

Fall Line

Fall Line

noun

1. SKIING

the route leading straight down any particular part of a slope.

"study the fall line and plan your turns"

© 2018 Michael Gehron

ISBN: 9780463538142
Contents

Chapter 1 - False Start

Chapter 2 - Life's Three Paths

Chapter 3 - Afghanistan

Chapter 4 - Adventure Cut Short

Chapter 5 - To Go To Togo

Chapter 6 - Kimendo Road

Chapter 7 - Homecoming

Chapter 8 - Starting the Firm

Chapter 9 - Equally Disappointed

Chapter 10 - Madagascar

Chapter 11 - (A)Sordid Adventures

Chapter 12 - Total Financial Independence

Chapter 13 - Merger & Acquisition

Chapter 14 - Fresh Start

Chapter 15 - Trials and Tremors in TeaZed

Chapter 16 - The End

1. False Start

One day in Togo, West Africa, I returned home to find a group of village women gathered around my house. The house was roofless. Its corrugated lid lay thirty feet away. Inside, I found everything heaped in a pile at the center of the room. Even the most fragile things, like the glass chimney of my hurricane lamp, remained intact.

My friend and colleague, Sebou, arrived as soon as he heard that I was home. He acted as my interpreter. The village women spoke over one another, competing to talk about a mighty wind. They said they'd watched it spin down from a nearby hill. They saw it swirl in through an open window. Then the roof popped off like a champagne cork.

Having exhausted all comment, the group dispersed. I stood puzzling over the improbable pile of items stacked in the middle of the room. I wondered if the village had gotten together and taken the roof off themselves.

Sebou laughed when I told him what I was thinking. He said it was crazy, first because why would the village do that? And second, he said, if they'd done it, did I really think they'd be able to keep the secret for as long as they already had? I agreed that, knowing them, it seemed unlikely.

He then told me two more things. First, there would be no end of speculation about why this had happened. The whole village would want to figure out what I had done to deserve my house blowing down. They would want to identify the person whose spirit-guide had exacted this revenge. Second, I couldn't sit back and shrug this off because there were things I had to do. He said he wasn't sure what those specific things were yet, but he'd speak with the village elders and figure it out. They would know exactly what to do.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me roll the tape back first.

My Peace Corps boss dropped me, along with my new mattress, in Kpagouda during the summer of '78. After a few minutes, an old man walked up and introduced himself. "Monsieur Robert," he said in French, stiffening his posture in a Legionnaire salute. The village chief had asked him to wait for an anasar – white man – and to show him to a house. On the way there he asked where I was from. When I said 'I'm an American', he looked startled. "So you've been to the moon?" he asked.

A short distance later, he pointed to a house. Before I could walk through the door, someone shouted, "You're not wanted here. Go away." The open hostility surprised me, as did the fact the words were in English.

The speaker turned out to be another Peace Corps volunteer, Evan, who had arrived the previous day. He'd been promised he would be the only volunteer in town. He said he had no intention of sharing a house. I told him I'd find alternative lodging as soon as I could.

The next morning, I set off to have a look around. Within a few minutes I'd reached the point at which the short line of straw-roofed huts ended. Beyond that was only the vast African plain. The very last of the dwellings caught my eye because it alone had a tin roof where all the rest were straw. It also had flat walls with squared corners where all the rest were round.

Despite the lovely vista across the street, the square building was an ugly smudge in an untended yard. The windows stood empty and open, bracketed by weary wooden panels drooping from rusted hinges. The front door, like the roofing, consisted of a thin sheet of corrugated tin. A dime-sized Chinese lock held the door in place. The building was so clearly abandoned that I didn't hesitate to put my foot to the door.

That afternoon, I reported to my new job at the local agricultural extension office. The guy I spoke to asked me where I was staying. I mentioned the issue with Evan at the first house. I told him I'd found alternative accommodations and described the place on the edge of town. I asked Sebou, my new Ag extension counterpart, if he thought there'd be any problem with my taking it. When he realized which house I was talking about, his eyes widened in surprise. "You can't stay there," he said, with a firm shake of his head. "That is not a good house."

"But it is fine for me," I assured him.

"No. I'm telling you it is not a good house." I pushed it further, asking if anyone would stop me if I hauled my stuff down there and just moved in. He ignored the question and stuck to his reply. Despite his counsel, I moved in the same day. It took me several months to appreciate his point of view.

The problems arose so gradually I hardly notice them. It didn't seem all that strange that there would be scorpions inhabiting an abandoned house. It freaked me out the time one fell on me from out of nowhere like some biblical pestilence. But then I realized it wasn't delivered from on high. It had just fallen from where it been crawling along an exposed roof beam. And I'd managed to crush it before it had a chance to sting.

My ten year old neighbor, Kodjo, was my self-appointed houseboy. He maintained a 'scorpion kill list' in hash marks he chalked across one wall. He embellished it with a cartoon of himself holding a flip-flop above an enormous scorpion. I got a kick out of watching the tally grow. It didn't even strike me as odd when, thirty days in, the tally exceeded the number of nights I'd stayed in the house.

Besides Kodjo, another young man named Mobi-ja was around a lot. In fact, he'd actually moved in. He was from a village about thirty miles away but he'd earned a coveted high school slot. Ours was the closest school around. I agreed to give him room and board in exchange for his doing all my chores. It was a good arrangement – for me at least. He did everything. He bought my meat at the market and carried my water from the stream.

But back to house problems. I wasn't there when they found the snake. Kodjo killed it, though not my ten-year old neighbor. Kodjo from the Peace Corps office. 'Kodjo' is the local language word for Monday, as in 'Our Man Monday'. It was also the day on which both the 'local' and the Peace Corps Kodjo were born. Peace Corps Kodjo drove up and discovered the snake on my doorstep one afternoon before I'd gotten back from work. When I got home, I found both Kodjo and the dead snake on the stoop. "It's a Kiese," he said, looking as if he feared it would come back to life. "It came out of that hole beside the door. You're lucky it didn't get you inside. It has a neurotoxin that paralyses your heart. It kills in minutes." He shook his head and remembered the business that brought him to my house. "I have some bad news," he said. "Can we talk inside?

Sitting in my living room, Kodjo told me about a recent accident. He said a truck had hit a married Peace Corps couple as they were crossing a small bridge on a motorcycle. The two of them were friends of mine. Kodjo said he had heard that they were headed home from a local market where they stopped to have some beers with me. Then the news got worse.

They were riding a shitty local bike that couldn't handle the slippery dirt and the washboard in the roads. And while their bike was bad, their marriage might have been worse. They were under the common stress all volunteers face living in a taxing foreign environment. But they had the added strain of being newlyweds and that also took its toll. I'd seen Bruce get angry with Tanya, and he'd done it again after we met at the market. He seemed to grow angrier and more morose in proportion to how much beer had flowed. And we had quite a bit that afternoon.

"He thought he could beat an on-coming truck across a one-lane bridge," Kodjo told me. "He judged it wrong. The truck crushed his leg and knocked them both over the side into a stream. They plan to amputate his leg today. But because Bruce was bleeding so much, he got more attention than Tanya. That turns out to have been a mistake. She got a bacterial infection - gaseous gangrene -and there wasn't much they could do. I'm sorry, Mike. Tanya died yesterday." Kodjo left a short time later. I sat alone in my living room as dusk turned into dark. I couldn't even bring myself to light my kerosene lantern.

It was a Sunday. I know because that's the day I took my Chloroquine malaria tablet. I generally took it in the morning because of its effect on me. As it did to many others, it gave me terrible dreams if I took it late. I'd forgotten to take a tablet that morning so I took the bitter pill as soon as Kodjo left. Then I headed off to bed.

That night I slept as badly as I ever have. At one point about three in the morning I awoke with a start. Mobi-ja, my houseboy, stood leaning over me, his face inches from my own. I tried to push against him so I could sit upright. But he jumped back and then slumped against the wall. "What do you want?" I demanded.

When he refused to answer, I jumped out of bed. "I asked you what you want?" I said again. And I reached out to grab his arm. But I must have suddenly awoken because whatever I was talking to had completely disappeared. It might have been the Chloroquine, or the shock of Tanya's death. It may have been a combination of the two. But whatever it was - dream, ghost, whatever - it left me totally freaked out. And I remained that way for a very long time, though I was too afraid of sounding crazy to mention it to anyone in town.

But I want to get back to what happened to my roof.

To describe Kpagouda – or any of Togo for that matter – as 'superstitious' doesn't do it justice. Togo and Benin, its next door twin, are the birthplaces of Voodoo. Here tree spirits are very much alive. If you live long enough among people who share these beliefs, it is hard to dismiss their point of view.

Here's an example: I was sitting with my farm cooperative at a steel table in a mud walled bar at 10:30 one morning. We'd spent the previous four hours working in their fields. There were enough of us in there that the conversation broke into two groups, one at each end of the table. The far end of the table erupted as two back legs of one of the chairs cracked off, throwing its occupant to the floor. The entire table swung towards me in unison blurting things like "How'd you do that?" and "Wow, you must be really strong!" The guy who had fallen was apparently disrespecting me when his chair came apart. Everyone was certain I'd used my powers to drop him to the floor.

They were certain because that is how their world works. Which was also the reason the villagers were so eager to find whoever had a reason to blow my house down. This wasn't just some random natural event – it had happened for a reason. And everyone in town wanted to find out what that reason was.

Sebou was true to his word about discussing the situation with the village elders. The elders said I needed to hire a charlatan, which is French for 'sorcerer' or 'medicine man'. They even told me which one to get. He was an old man from neighboring Benin. He arrived wrapped in a protective covering made from woven yellowed fronds. The elders also instructed me to buy a goat, seven chickens, and a big clay pot of local brew. Then they invited everyone in town. The townsfolk slaughtered the animals and set them to the grill. The beer flowed as the old Beninois circled the remnants of the house. He trailed a stream of village children as his entourage. Soon he entered the roofless structure. There, he circled each room in his organic armor, shaking rattles and intoning chants.

After some time he came back out and settled on a stump beside the village chief. He asked Sebou to translate for me as the villagers gathered round. "A very angry spirit blew your roof off," Sebou translated solemnly. "He says you are lucky you weren't killed. He says the spirit let you live because the village is happy you are here. But you should never have come and taken this house. He says the village knows that this house is bad. It should not have been built next to the town's oldest burial ground. The tin roof disrespects the elders buried there."

Sebou added his own aside. "You know the man who built this house came running out screaming one night and he never came back. He's a soldier in Lomé – I know him. A really tough man – and he came out screaming. Then he rented it to two young women and one was bitten by a viper the same week she moved in. That woman died and the other woman moved out."

"So I should never have moved here," I said. "That's what you've been telling me all along."

Sebou was nice enough not to rub it in. Instead he tipped his head to listen as the old witch doctor spoke. "The charlatan says that the ancestors tried to coax you out, but you wouldn't leave. He said they sent scorpions to chase you out." I smiled and nodded. Everyone in town knew about the scorpions. I kept a tally on my wall. "Lots of scorpions," I confirmed.

"And you had a poisonous snake inside?" Again, this earned a smile. The village telegraph had certainly been at work. I could only think of a couple of people I'd mentioned that story to, but I wasn't too surprised that it had gotten around. Anything unusual I did soon became the talk of the town. Still, I had to hand it to the charlatan. He'd done his homework.

Finally Sebou turned and looked at me wide-eyed, as though he couldn't believe what he'd just heard. "The old man says they sent a spirit. He says that you were visited by a ghost."

This was the first comment that hadn't made me smile. I'd thought about the eerie nocturnal visit frequently, but I was certain I'd never mentioned it to anyone. The truth is that I was embarrassed by my reaction; my near-certainty that I had really seen a ghost. After a moment, I confessed in front of the entire village. "Yes," I nodded. "I was visited by a spirit."

An aside: I returned to Kpagouda for the first time last year with my wife and kids. It had been almost forty years since I'd been there. I looked for people I remembered or for anyone who might remember me. It turned out that very few of the villagers from back then are still alive. I did manage to find Sebou's sole surviving wife of the four that he'd once had. She helped me find a couple others who'd been around back in my time. We all shared a pot of local beer and reminisced about those days. When I asked if they remembered the story about my old house, one of the men said, "Remember it? Everyone in Kpagouda knows that story, even the little kids. We talk about it all the time."

All this connects back to Evan, the volunteer who'd told me he didn't want me to share 'his' house. He was the one who had precipitated all of it yet he was probably the only person in town who had not witnessed my confession. He wasn't there because he took pains to ensure that our paths rarely crossed. Still, shortly thereafter, he flagged me down as I passed him near the market. He said, "I think we've proved we can maintain our distance." We started our relationship from there.

It turned out that we actually got along quite well and soon established a weekly date to play chess. After a time, we opened up to each other and he told me that he was gay (I told him I'd figured that out the first time we'd met). He asked me what I planned to do when I left Peace Corps and I said I really didn't know. How about him? He told me he was pretty sure he knew exactly what he'd do. He said Harvard Law School had accepted him before he joined Peace Corps. They'd allowed him to defer until after he finished.

Later, the topic came up again, and he further amplified. "I want to be the guy who makes gay marriage legal in the United States." At the time he said this, 1979, inter-racial couples were still under attack on our Virginia streets. I reminded him of that and added, "And you think you're going to pass a law to allow men to marry men?"

After we both finished Peace Corps, I occasionally caught some mention of him in the press. Once, I noticed that Time Magazine had added him to their "10 People to Watch" list. He was listed for his work in promotion of same-sex marriage. In June, 2011, I found another photo of him in the press. In it, he stood beside New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The Governor was signing New York's same-sex marriage bill into law. Even later, I saw him on the PBS News Hour. He was Jim Lehrer's lead interview. President Obama had just announced his support for a national same sex marriage law.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about him:

Evan Wolfson (born February 4, 1957) is an attorney and gay rights advocate. He is the founder and president of Freedom to Marry, a group favoring same-sex marriage in the United States. Wolfson, who many consider to be the father and leader of the same-sex marriage movement, authored the book Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry. He was listed as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World...

2. Life's Three Paths

In 1979, Evan Wolfson told me he was committing his life to legalizing same sex marriage. In 2015, he was one of a handful of people credited with accomplishing this goal. But his work on same-sex marriage - incredible as it is \- isn't why I call him out. I call him out because he is a great example of someone who set himself a difficult life goal and reached it.

Differences in the way people set their life goals intrigue me. I've asked hundreds of people about it and their responses form a pattern. People comfortably self-identify as being members of one of three groups. The first group contains people like Evan, who set life goals they eventually achieve. The second group is made up of those who set life goals that remain persistently out of reach. The third is populated by people who say they set no life goals at all. They are content following the path life presents them.

In this context, Evan is a member of the first group, but with a notable distinction. Evan's goal – legalizing same-sex marriage – was a monumental stretch. Evan is a person who set out to do the impossible - and accomplished it. Think about that for a second. Think about a person who set out to be the US President. Or down a notch, an NFL quarterback. Or someone who decides to be a professional ballerina, or a movie star, or a billionaire.

I decided some time ago to make an informal study of people and their goals. What kind of person sets herself a goal? What happens to him when his goal is not achieved? I started looking for source material on the topic, but I couldn't locate much. So for the last decade or so, I have asked people a question (with the following intro): "I've asked a lot of people this question, and I'm consistently surprised that everyone seems to have a ready answer about themselves. I'll tell you my current tally on this survey after you answer this: People appear to break into three distinct groups." Then I lay out what I laid out above. "Now the question: Which group are you in?"

I have asked about two hundred people this question. I have never had anyone hesitate to self-categorize. (Note that this only works with people of a certain age...it doesn't make sense to ask people as they're starting out). Once they identify their group, I tell them the results of my informal study. Regardless of the number of times I've done this, the proportions remain about the same. One-third of respondents end up in each of the three groups.

That division doesn't surprise me much. It seems reasonable that two out of three people eventually settle on some specific path or goal. What does surprise me is that a third of the people I've asked believe that they've accomplished what they set out to do. I am betting this is sampling error. It could result from the socio-economic status of the people I know. Most are reasonably well-off professionals. I assume those numbers would change if I had a more randomized sample.

My personal goal-setting story goes like this: In 1963, when I was ten years old, my family moved to Switzerland. My father was a U.S. negotiator working on the nuclear test ban treaty in Geneva. My fifth grade teacher at the International School was Mrs. Elderfield.

One day Mrs. Elderfield passed back our graded essay books. She announced that she'd, "like to ask four students to come up and read their stories to the class." She called for the first reader and the girl came up and read her work. When she finished, Mrs. Elderfield said, "Wasn't that a wonderful story! That was the best essay in the class." Then she called up the second and the third saying, "Now we've heard the next best two." I was delighted to be called up fourth.

Once I'd finished reading, she clasped her hands in front of her and gave me a stern look. "And that, I am sorry to say, is the worst story I have graded in all my years of teaching." Then she told me to go sit down. Oddly, the day she revealed me as the 'worst writer she'd ever had' was also the day that I decided to become a writer.

Notice how I put that: 'to become a writer'. I did not say 'that was the day that I decided to write'. The difference may seem slight, but the subtlety would vex me for years. The problem was that I had no idea if I wanted to write. I'd never practiced it at all. I was only in fifth grade. Worse, I was apparently no good at it. So, while I had no idea whether I wanted to write, I knew I wanted to prove Mrs. Elderfield wrong.

But compare Evan's ambition to mine. Evan hadn't said, "I want to be a lawyer." That would equate to, "I want to make a high-six figure salary, drive a fancy car and join the country club". He'd said, "I want to legalize gay marriage." I, on the other hand, hadn't said, "I feel inspired to deepen people's awareness of man's inhumanity to man.' What I'd said was 'I want to be a writer.' Evan has accomplished his goal in spectacular fashion. I continue to struggle with my words.

Once again, from the top: In 1963, when I was ten years old, my family moved to Switzerland. My friends and I loved to keep up with the latest US trends. We took to hanging out at the school's wood working shop where we spent countless hours perfecting homemade skateboards.

I loved the shop for many reasons – not the least of which was that it was a refuge from Mrs. Elderfield. But I also loved the power tools. I liked the rip of the saws and the torque of the drills. Even the smell of the sawdust gave me a thrill.

My friends and I took to scheduling weekend time there as well. Mr. Adams, our Californian shop teacher, was happy to oblige. One day as we were finishing up, Mr. Adams asked if I could stay behind. He said he had an idea that would polish up my nearly completed board. As soon as my friends left, he grabbed me and started tearing off my clothes. His hands were all over me and I began to cry. When he worked his way into my pants, I felt my stomach rise and I threw up. The burst of vomit startled him into letting me loose for an instant. It was long enough for me to break away and run outside.

When I got home, I ran to my room and lay crying on my bed. My brother came in and asked me what was wrong. I didn't have the words to explain it. All I knew was that Mr. Adams had fondled me, kissed me and groped me in a way that only aligned with 'affection' in my young mind. But I also knew that what I felt was so ugly and disturbing it had caused me to retch. I told my brother that Mr. Adams had 'hugged me' and I'd thrown up. I recalled an expression I had heard but never understood. I asked my brother if he thought I might be 'lovesick'. I never went back to shop and even now the smell of sawdust makes me sick.

My abuse scarred me in many ways. It made me distrust authority. Mixing abuse of authority with a school setting became my personal 'perfect storm'. I found it again in high school. 1968, the height of the war in Vietnam, was my senior year. My school invited a classmate's father, who was in charge of the Veterans Administration, to address a school assembly. The topic was 'our patriotic duty to support the war', a war we all opposed.

Midway through the speech, I rushed the stage and grabbed his microphone. I did it on shear impulse, without a moment's thought. I bellowed, "Do we want to hear any more of this shit?" My classmates' reaction astonished me. The auditorium erupted in a thunderous 'No!' Then I shouted, "So let's get the hell out of here." And to a person they got up and fled the school. Fortunate for them, Bishop Ireton High allowed them to return the next day. Unfortunate for me, they threw me out.

While still in high school, I became an avid camper. It wasn't a natural fit for me. I don't hunt, fish, or chop wood. And Mr. Adams ensured that I'd never use a saw. But not only did I take up camping, I often camped alone. One time I got a back-country permit and stopped, as usual, wherever I found myself at dusk. I strung a little tube tent between two trees and fired up my cooking stove. Later that night, one of the Shenandoah Park's legendary thunderstorms came through.

Until that night, I hadn't known what lightening sounds like when it is really close. When lightening comes down so close that you can actually feel its heat, the sound isn't its typical 'boom'. It's more like the deep base buzz of an electric arc. And that night I heard that sound quite a bit. The next morning, I wrung out all my gear and decided to pack it in. I left the woods by the most direct path, heading straight out for the road.

I hadn't been walking long when a park ranger pulled up beside me. "You camp out last night?" he asked. When I told him that I had, he offered me a lift. We talked about lightening as we headed for the place I'd left my car. I told him about the arching sound of lightening I had heard. He nodded solemnly and said, "Yep, that sure is how it sounds alright...I know all about that." When I asked him how he knew, this is the story that he told – in the very words I had recorded long ago:

"I was told the following day by a park ranger, who offered me a lift part way back, that the park is the most lightning struck place on the planet and he himself was the Guinness world record holder for the most lightning struck person in the world – three times. He proudly displayed the scar across his throat, as wide as a butcher knife of melted skin. "Sitting right here in this truck. Bolt hit the truck and the lightening arched between the metal of the window vent on the passenger side and this window vent right here," he said. [He was tapping the little glass triangle older cars used to have].

Here's the next note I have from that original document:

[Note on the above]: It is a sunny Sunday morning in February some years after writing this, and yesterday the Washington Post had a book review for a new book called 'The Improbability Principle'. It says this:

"Roy Sullivan, a park ranger in Virginia, no doubt spent a great deal of time outside in all kinds of weather. He was struck in 1942, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1976 and 1977..."

The reference made me wonder if this was the same guy who had picked me up the morning after the storm. I looked up Roy Sullivan on wikipedia. This is what I found:

Roy Cleveland Sullivan (February 7, 1912 – September 28, 1983) was a U.S. park ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Between 1942 and 1977, Sullivan was hit by lightning on seven different occasions and survived all of them... Sullivan is recognized by Guinness World Records as the person struck by lightning more recorded times than any other human being...

The first documented lightning strike of Sullivan occurred in April 1942. He was hiding from a thunderstorm in a fire lookout tower. The tower was newly built and had no lightning rod at the time; it was hit seven or eight times. Inside the tower, "fire was jumping all over the place..."

He was hit again in July 1969. Unusually, he was hit while in his truck, driving on a mountain road—the metal body of a vehicle normally protects people in cases such as this by acting as a Faraday cage. The lightning first hit nearby trees and was deflected into the open window of the truck. The strike knocked Sullivan unconscious and burned off his eyebrows, eyelashes, and most of his hair...

The text goes on to describe five more after that.

Given my lackluster high school grades, it would have been hard for me to get into any decent school. But with my high school enforcing a 'no reference' policy because of the school assembly incident, my chance of getting into college was nil. So I felt very fortunate when, at the last second, Regis College in Denver agreed to let me in. At the time, the original 'flower children' counter-culture was becoming mainstream, and its 'back to nature' movement was as central to it as sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The Back to Nature ethos played itself out in the Rocky Mountain High state as much, or more, than anywhere else.

Regis responded to this imperative by allowing me a three day a week school schedule. I dedicated the rest of the time to the mountains – skiing, hiking and camping out. When four days off became insufficient, I left school for a semester in Aspen. I found temporary work in a kitchen and spent my afternoons walking in Maroon Bells.

After two years at Regis, I enrolled in Denison. That meant I'd managed to switch from majestic Colorado to, well, central Ohio. In this part of the mid-west, hippies were not a thing of the past; they'd never arrived at all. Denison was a fraternity-oriented culture. I was fortunate to find a group of faculty and students who cast themselves outside of that. We got credentialed by a program called 'Challenge/Discovery' to take students on month-long wilderness adventures. The first one we did was to Big Bend national park in Southwest Texas.

I don't recall if there was a selection process or if I got included just by hanging around the group. However it happened, I was included as instructor/guide in a truly memorable crowd. Among the great people I met there was my eventual roommate, Doug. The first time I met him I'd just yelled 'Falling'. That is the rock-climbing command you shout to alert the person on the other end of the rope that you've seriously blown a move. It is what you yell as you break into a free-fall. In this case, though, I hadn't 'blown a move'. I'd just wimped out. I had convinced myself I was too tired to finish up the pitch, or that it was too tough or something.

In my defense, I first asked Doug politely for a little 'assist'. I asked him to add a little tension to the rope so I wouldn't fall when attempting a move I doubted I could make. But he refused, insisting that this was so much not the point of rock climbing. So I decided that I'd just let go. I announced it by yelling 'falling'.

As soon as he lowered me to the ground, he stomped over and ripped my shirt open. When I asked what the fuck that was about, he responded more to our climbing group than to me. "I'm looking for the holes where they put the filling in, you Twinkie." Fortunate for me, the nickname didn't stick – at least beyond the next few weeks.

Then there was Espen, this huge Norwegian friendly giant. As fate would have it, he dated my high school girlfriend immediately after I'd left for college. While I didn't know he even existed until I met him at Denison, he let me know that he knew me. He'd had to endure his girlfriend telling stories...and I think it may have skewed our relationship a bit. But besides his knowing I am something of a dickhead, we still managed to be friends.

Janny was a pistol...a cigar smoking tough-ass broad who was just the cutest girl. There were a bunch more – Jon, The potter and Jan the dancer, and of course Sue-Sue, who was also a volunteer EMT. A terrific crowd.

When the time came to take the group out to Big Bend for the month, Doug and I got assigned the logistics detail. That meant taking our van into the hiking camps before the groups arrived and prepping the place by dropping off water. Big Bend is a desert and water's heavy....eight pounds a gallon. So you can't carry more than about three day's-worth along with all your other gear.

By design, the program builds leadership skills as much as outdoor proficiency. It ends by having small groups make week long treks through the featureless desert. The pervasive brown sand makes it difficult to 'orienteer' or guide yourself by map.

Doug and I were 'sweepers' for one of the groups. We were to stay out of sight but ensure the group found their water. And to do that, they needed to follow their maps. A big part of the exercise involved checking each other's orienteering plan. But our group decided to follow a guy who claimed he knew what he was doing. By the third day, I'd determined that they were an extra day's walk from their next water stop. That meant they were at risk of running out. I decided to intervene.

Once they settled into camp, I came in and explained their situation. What I said upset everyone, some to the point of tears. They blamed themselves for letting one person take on all the navigation responsibilities. They acknowledged that the task of orienteering should have been everyone's job. They decided to go up a nearby bluff the following morning and figure out where they really were.

The next morning they returned to camp and reported. "You taught us a very valuable lesson. We can't tell you how much we appreciate that." I nodded solemnly, though I wasn't looking for their thanks.

"You told us not to listen to someone just because they convince you that they know what they are talking about. That we should always assume it's our responsibility to double check the facts. So we thank you for that lesson, but there is a little catch. It turns out that the self-proclaimed know-it-all who got it wrong wasn't who you thought. The person who doesn't know where he is...is you." Turns out, I had been doing my triangulation wrong. The guy they followed had it right.

Challenge/Discovery sent someone to review our progress with the program. The guy had a shaved head revealing three deep indentations equally spaced around his crown. When he saw me notice them, he said, "Weird right? But not as weird as how I got them. I was hiking in the Flat Irons outside Boulder, Colorado, on a beautiful moonlit night. All of a sudden I heard a whoosh and felt myself being lifted up off the ground. An enormous owl must have mistaken my shiny head for a rabbit. It swooped down and locked onto me and tried to pull me off the ground."

Before he left, he showed us a little wooden rifle stock that contained a pop-out pistol. He could add a stored barrel to it and it became a pretty good rifle. He said, "I always camp with this because the only animal I fear in the wilderness is man." With this, he tapped my latent dread.

Upon returning from my stint in Peace Corps, I got a call from another member of our wilderness group. He told me that one of our close friends and co-instructors, Sue-Sue Ramsey, she was dead. Here is Wikipedia's description of the tragic events:

Randall Lee Smith (1954 – 10 May 2008) was a convicted murderer from Pearisburg, Virginia. He pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Robert Mountford Jr. and Laura Susan Ramsay, who were killed while hiking the Appalachian Trail, in May 1981. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, but was released in 1996 on mandatory parole after serving only 15 years...

On May 6, 2008, Smith attempted to kill two fishermen less than two miles from the site of the 1981 murders. He befriended the two fishermen, who shared their dinner with Smith, before opening fire on them without warning. Both men were shot twice, but survived. Smith was arrested that day after attempting to escape in one of the victim's trucks and subsequently crashing. He died in jail four days later as a result of injuries sustained in the crash.

Twinkie that I am, with my worst fears realized in too personal a way, I stopped wilderness camping. Without being too intentional about it, my love of the outdoors and I simply parted ways.

Earlier I said, 'I wanted to be a writer.' I want to pick back up on that.

The idea of becoming a writer had grown on me since way back in the fifth grade. I thought I'd like it because, first off, it didn't sound like real hard work. That appealed to my basic laziness. Until I got to college I never saw a grade better than a 'C'. I hit the mean, mode and median in every standardized test I ever took. Well, except this one time I was off the charts. That was in 1976, my final year in college. I took the Graduate Record Exams (GREs). '76 was the year they decided to go from two parts – Math and English – to three, adding 'Critical Thinking' as well. They told us that taking the new part was mandatory, but that it would not be included in our score. They were still shaking that section out.

A couple of months after I took the exam, I got a call from the Educational Testing Service. They told me that I'd scored an off the charts 99% on Critical Thinking. They wanted to run a battery of tests on me to find out how my brain works. I was more than happy to oblige until they pointed out that 99% actually meant that I had only gotten 1% of the questions right. Then I modified my response to say, "I'd still be happy to answer your questions, but you have to pay me for my time." That, I thought, is how my brain works.

Second, I had a pronounced and growing fondness for alcohol and drugs. I drank so much that my sister Anne often reminded me of what I said when she claimed I was drinking too much. Mimicking me, she'd slur, "Don't bear fault {hiccup} wiss-net." From everything I'd read, writers were expected to indulge in substance abuse.

Finally, I had recently learned that I had what is generously termed 'a fucked up personality'. This took me by surprise...and more time than it should have to figure out. I had gotten plenty of hints. The one that finally brought it home was when my mother suggested that I might like the novel "The Rosie Project". The book is written from the perspective of a person with Asperger's Syndrome. That's a mild form of autism which manifests itself as a distinct lack of empathy. I'm not sure what empathy is...not that I really care.

Half way through the book I mentioned to my wife that the protagonist had Asperger's. I added jokingly, "You know, I might have a touch of that." To which she replied, deadpan, "You think?" Worse, when I mentioned this exchange to several friends, they all immediately laughed. The only one who didn't laugh was my brother. He said, "You don't have Asperger's Syndrome. You have Asshole's Syndrome."

So my motivations and skill set may not have been a perfect writing fit. Now, in my sixties, my goal of 'being a writer' has long been in the rearview mirror. I am firmly in the second group; those that set themselves goals they would not achieve. But I also know that I am not alone. Living lives of unrealized goals may characterize a third of us. This book strives to document the challenges I faced in adjusting my sights and in setting secondary goals.

3. Afghanistan

While I had a few small successes with my writing, it was always clear to me that I wasn't very good at it. I remember weird snippets of things like taking a long rambling bunch of paragraphs and cutting them into disassociated blocks. I jumbled them up, so stoned at the time that I thought I could randomly pull them out and they'd miraculously form a coherent story. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to approach composing a tale with a legitimate beginning, middle, and an end. The task seemed insurmountable to me. I suppose that should have been a clue.

With graduation looming, I grasped for a plan. I'd taken to saying if you were a very good writer, you could make anything interesting. If you were not, you better have something interesting to say. I applied to Peace Corps in hopes it would give me time to write and something to write about.

The application asked about geographic preferences. I envisioned some dusty African village where women walked around without covering their sagging breasts. But I didn't care where they sent me. I'd just finished James Michener's wonderful book "Caravans" which make Afghanistan sound like the cruelest place on earth. So rather than tell Peace Corps where I wanted to go, I told them where I didn't: Afghanistan.

Several months later, I got a letter from Peace Corps congratulating me for being selected to serve six months hence in the South Pacific island Kingdom of Tonga. Several months after that, I got another letter saying, 'Whoops – you won't be going to Tonga after all, but if you're willing to wait an _additional_ six months, we can get you into (wait for it) Afghanistan'. What was I going to do? It wasn't like I had another plan. I shrugged and took to the deal.

Afghanistan was not what I expected it to be. Sure, there was the unimaginable cruelty that Michener described, but there was also a stark beauty to the country and a regal majesty to those who live there. And the period during which I'd arrived – the first weeks of 1978 - was one the most peaceful moments in the history of that war-torn country.

If Afghanistan failed to conform to my image of the country, my concept of Peace Corps was even further off the mark. I'd mentally prepared for physical deprivation and mental anguish. Instead, we were taken from the airport to the poshest part of town. I was dropped with three others at a lovely two-bedroom house with a small sunroom looking out on a garden courtyard. A houseboy stoked our pot-bellied stove while a cook heaped our plates with Kabuli Pulao.

I had my first cultural awakening on a downtown Kabul street. The road was lined in three and four-story buildings. The snow on these buildings had accumulated into two feet of frozen slush. Groups of men worked to crack the slabs with heavy spikes. They pushed the ice blocks to the edge and pitched them to sidewalk forty feet below.

From a safe distance I watched the ice explode against the ground in a spray of fist-sized chunks of shrapnel. But it wasn't the concussive force that floored me. It was that none of those walking beneath the fusillade even bothered to cross the street.

When I asked my cross-culture teacher about it later, he said it was an expression of their faith in God. They believe God preordained the course of their lives. If He intended for them to be hit by falling ice, then it was His will. They stuck to their path in homage to Allah.

'Culture', our shared values, is all encompassing. It includes everything from the profound – like a shared belief in God – to the superficial. On the superficial end, I was playing chess in Kabul - not well, but often. I'd seen lovely chess sets in many of the shops, most carved from vibrant local stone. I went into one shop and asked the price. The merchant gave a price that, while reasonable, was well beyond what my three dollar daily earnings would allow. I looked further around the shop and spied a small bag of plastic black and white pieces sitting on a black and red checked paper board. "That one," I said. "That's all I really need."

"That one!" he exclaimed. "That's the most expensive set in the shop."

"That cheap little plastic one?" I demand.

"That 'cheap little plastic one' is the only plastic chess set in all Afghanistan!" he replied. "And it comes from the U.S.!"

As Michener had warned, the day to day brutality was extreme. I saw three guys who had robbed a bus outside of Kandahar hanging by their writs from the struts of a flatbed truck. As the truck rolled slowly through the city, pedestrians pelted them with stones. A short time later they were hanged in the public square in front of the mayor's office.

And while some of the violence I witnessed was planned, some of it was incidental. Like the time I flipped my wet jeans over the clothesline that turned out to be a bare 220 volt wire. I felt like I was being drawn and quartered, as if my shoulders, elbows and knees were being torn apart. A passerby realized I was being grounded by electrical current and couldn't let go of my wet pants. He took a flying leap and knocked me off the wire. He understood, as I would not have, that he had to keep both his feet in the air when he touched me. That was the only way he could avoid becoming grounded right along with me. I am forever grateful for his wisdom and bravery.

I began teaching Business English at Kabul University. But the longer I taught, the less committed I felt. I tried to analyze my feelings and it boiled down to this: Peace Corps was giving me wonderful new experiences and I was starting to write them down. But we were as far as you could get from the English-speaking world. The work of teaching (and learning) English seemed a waste of time. I started losing my passion for the work.

Fortunately, as my passion for teaching receded, it found a new focus right next door. Peace Corps provided daily reminders that Afghan women were off-limits. This applied, not only to us, but to every man in Afghanistan. We were told that even asking a friend how his wife was getting on could result in a swift beating. "To ask after her suggests you know her. And that suggests her virtue has been compromised. As long as you behave as if no women exist in Afghanistan, you will get along just fine."

One day I saw a young woman peeking into our courtyard from a ladder she'd propped against our eight foot wall. She ducked away when I spotted her and it took some cajoling to get her to show herself again. When I asked in Farsi what she was doing there, she answered in British-accented English. "My father told me he had rented our house next door to four American boys. My curiosity got the better of me."

Shallah had recently returned from a British boarding school. She said she felt under house arrest after all the freedom she had known at school. "My father would severely beat me if he knew I was speaking to you," she said. Then after a minute she added, "And he would certainly kill you." She began meeting me, along with one of my housemates, at the wall each day. After a while she decided that she wanted to come visit our side of the wall. When her visits became routine, we decided she might be interested in one or the other of us. By the time she let on she was interested in me, I was infatuated with her.

Shallah told me she was minor royalty in Afghanistan. She was descended from Zahir Shah, a former king who ruled Balochistan from 1933 until 1973. She was also one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen.

In all the time we spent together, she remained a chaste and proper Afghan girl. The most we ever did was hold hands, but somehow that was enough to make my heart take flight. The terror of knowing what her father would do if he discovered us didn't dissuade me. In fact, I think it added to the romance. Though even from the beginning I suspected things would not end well.

4. Adventure Cut Short

This being ill-fated Afghanistan, the ending started with a war. Fortunate for me, my experience of the fighting only lasted a couple of days. For the Afghans the fighting continues even now. 'Poor Afghanistan' doesn't began to describe it. The war I witnessed was actually the prelude to the 'real' war, which started when the Soviets came in. That, in turn, was a prelude to the 'humanitarian' war which we Americans undertook. And the 'humanitarian' phase, forty long years after I left, is still going on. This is how it began:

I was living in Shari Now, around the corner from 'Chicken Street'. Chicken Street was popular with globe-wandering hippies, World Travelers called WTs. My housemates and I played on the Peace Corps softball team. One lovely April weekend we set up a game with the Marines who guarded the U.S. Embassy. That afternoon, three of us hailed a cab and headed towards the field beside the American compound. As we passed the President's palace, a tank came racing down the middle of the road, forcing us into a ditch. Gunfire erupted from both sides of the road. It looked like Afghan regulars were firing on the presidential guard. The taxi driver sped up and we, stoned out of our gourds, chuckled and shook our heads. One of us repeated our mantra, 'only in Afghanistan'.

The players on the ball field were evacuating as we arrived. One of the Marines shouted, "There's a coup going down, go back home". My roommate shouted back, "Ok, but can we buy that case of beer?" The Marines had the only beer in all of Afghanistan and they brought it to all their games.

Another tank rumbled up the road tearing up the concrete with its heavy metal tread. As it pulled even with us, it stopped and pointed its gun across the street towards the Ministry of Defense. It fired and blew a corner off the building. The Marine handed us the case of Bud.

A couple of hours later we had a pile of empty cans growing by our chairs in the courtyard. We took turns narrating the approach of the Mig fighters overhead. The Migs looped around the city as though they were thoroughbreds on the track. "And it's Lucky Lady coming in for another run (the screeching roar of a low overhead pass). And she's firing another round (the tactile womp of the supersonic missile). And it's a direct hit on the palace (followed by a huge concussive blast)." One of the blasts was so close that it blew a couple of our windows out. One of my housemates taped the whole thing on his cassette player. We listened to our narration over the sounds of battle for months.

The actual fighting lasted only three days, but a lot of people suffered during that time. Fellow volunteers told stories of runaway tanks smashing bystanders against city walls. We saw whole apartment buildings blown to smoking ruins by errant shells. Most terrifying of all was the nightly ordeal of Russian helicopters hovering overhead. They pointed huge spotlights onto our houses and rained rockets down at random intervals. All talking stopped when the light blazed across our windows. We were filled with momentary dread. This is how I fictionalized the scene some months later in my manuscript, Jihad:

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Prologue Kabul, Afghanistan: April 27, 1978

The day all hell broke loose in Kabul started out like any other day. A Thursday, proceeding the Islamic holy day, and the city skies were clear for the first time since the beginning of winter. A pale gray pallor of wood smoke rose from the thousands of heating stoves which formed the center piece of family life. It seeped through the narrow canyons of the towering Koe-E-Baba Mountains which surrounded the high plateau like mythic sentries. Poppies, the ubiquitous flowers of Southwest Asia, broke through the hard-packed walls and rooftops. The bright red volunteers sprang from the mud used in repairs made the previous year. Even the children who sold cigarettes, candies, and fruit were back in the streets with the departure of the bitter winter cold.

Read More of Jihad:

But back to the fighting in Afghanistan and what it taught me. I mentioned I was increasingly disappointed with my teaching assignment. I was getting more interested in straight International Development, that is helping poor countries with their basic infrastructure like power and roads. But this was the late seventies and our 'assistance' wasn't all positive. We seemed as likely to support a Latin American dictator's goon squads as to build a road. So I was having doubts.

Until, that is, the war broke out. As soon as there was a real need for help, questions about 'donor motives' disappeared. And there was real need in Afghanistan. They needed emergency medical attention. They needed temporary shelter, food and other necessities. And that brought it all home for me. From that day onward, I decided that if I couldn't be a writer, I'd make my living as an international emergency response worker. And with that resolved, I left Afghanistan with something like a plan, or more aptly, a Plan B.

The days after the Kabul coup continued to be challenging. Half of the volunteers, when given the option to leave or stay, opted to leave immediately. I was among the half that decided to stay. At one point early on, Afghan agents grabbed one of my fellow volunteers from the classroom next to mine. They dragged him to the basement of the Ministry of Defense where they tortured him. They ended by putting a pistol against his head and pulling the trigger on an empty chamber. He was terribly traumatized by these events. Still, Peace Corps convinced him to relate the details of his ordeal to the rest of us before they sent him home. What cautionary message we were to glean from his harrowing account we never figured out.

His was the most blatant case of what we now know as PTSD. But, after the ordeal of several days of aerial bombardment, most of us had it in one form or another. Mine took the form of recurring dreams of being chased by fighter planes. The planes morphed over time into space ships and other things, and I am not completely rid of them today. It also turned into a compulsion to learn to pilot those planes myself. In fact, so strong was this obsession that I went off to a flight school and told them of my plans. They tried to disabuse me of the belief I would be soon be flying jets. Instead, they proposed a long and arduous path that began with fixed wing planes.

I badgered them until they explained the difficulties involved with flying jets. Then they suggested that the closest experience I could get was flying gliders. They said glider training could easily be arranged. So off I went to learn to fly gliders. If you've not been in one, gliders are amazing. The pilot sits surrounded in a glass bubble of a cockpit on the aircraft's nose. With the bulk of the plane behind you, it feels like you are floating inside a soap bubble.

My first flight was in a two-seater. The real pilot sat behind me, leaving me with an unobstructed view. We rose behind our tow plane. We released to soar above the gorgeous Appalachian foothills. We soared in the utter quite of this elegant engineless craft for fifteen minutes. Then the pilot broke in saying we had a decision to make. "If we keep it like this (meaning the smooth soaring following the ridges north) we have to head back for the field because all we're doing is slowly coming down. But if you'd like to stay up a while – which I am happy to do – then we need to catch an updraft." Up, up, and away, I signaled with my thumb.

He nodded and tipped our wings to almost vertical beneath a large black thunderhead. Then we began moving upward in a tight spiral. Within seconds my stomach rose and vomit filled my mouth. With the cockpit glass not four inches in front of me, I was pretty sure I'd get a face full of back splatter if I let it out. I struggled but managed to get it all to go back down. As we walked away from my first and only glider ride, he asked me if I wanted to sign up for more lessons. I thanked him but said I hoped to never see another glider. And I have been faithful to my word.

The main reason I passed up on the opportunity to get out of Afghanistan was my neighbor, Shallah. We spent countless hours talking about how we would weather this storm together. We created scenarios of being together, both with and without her father finding out. A couple of months after the fighting ended, the political situation was only getting worse. Peace Corps let us know that they wanted to draw down the number of volunteers. To do this, they mandated that anyone who had been in-country for a year or less had to pack and leave the following week. They didn't say that we were being evacuated. They said we were being sent to Iran for a cooling off period, after which we could decide to return. The decision to return to Afghanistan would be left entirely to us.

Shallah burst into tears when I told the news. "I knew this would happen. I knew you would leave me. This was never going to work," she said. I declared my commitment to our relationship. Then I swore that I would be back. I promised I would make it work. I asked only that she have a little faith in me.

We arrived in Tehran in the midst of the Iranian Revolution. The day we got in the militants bombed the carpet bazaar. The tanks on every corner attested to the massive social unrest. Hordes of protesters clogged every street. I remember thinking that it seemed like the entire world was at war.

I now know that even surreal situations can feel normal when lived through day by day. But a little distance is all you need to change that focus. It was easy to see the oddity of life in Afghanistan from the distance of Tehran. With two weeks of the 'normalcy' of rioting Iran, not a single one in my group of 'forced evacuees' decided to return to the chaos of war in Afghanistan.

For me, that meant leaving Peace Corps less than six months into my twenty-eight month tour. More than that, it meant breaking my oath to Shallah. But my growing dislike of my assignment, and the pressure Peace Corps put on us to abandon post, began to work. For one thing, they offered us our pick of onward posts. The pitch went like this:

They asked us to give them three criteria to match. I told them I wanted to learn a language I could use after Peace Corps. I didn't think all the effort I expended on learning Farsi would be of future use. Second, I didn't want to teach English any more. Instead I said I wanted to 'do actual development work'. Finally, between Challenge/Discovery and Afghanistan, I was sick of deserts. If I had to live in sand, I wanted it to be near the ocean.

They came back with Kpagouda, in Togo, West Africa. They told me that the national language there was French. They left out that my posting would be among the world's half a million people who spoke nothing but Kabye. They said I'd work on a USAID project training farmers to plow with oxen. They forgot to mention that the project wasn't funded yet. And they let me know Togo is on the beach. It also turned out to be a difficult two-day trip from Kpagouda that I only made a couple times a year.

What I knew as I left Teheran was that I was heading to a great program on a beautiful French-speaking beach. That gave me four weeks in the U.S. to get my relationship with Shallah sorted out. I knocked on my parent's door in Virginia before they'd even heard I had left Afghanistan.

Things didn't go well with Shallah. She reminded me that I had given her my word. She tearfully informed me that she'd known in her heart of hearts that I had no intention of helping her get out. I can't remember what I excuses I made...It can't have been very thoughtful or convincing. She was right in everything she said. With my tail between my legs, I promised again that I'd do anything to be with her. But for a while it was best if we planned to keep in regular touch. This despite knowing I would be in the heart of Africa and she across the sands of Afghanistan. It didn't sound plausible even to me.

The final chapter of this saga was as implausible as the rest. In time I heard that Shallah had made her way back to London, and after my first year in Togo, I also managed to get there. She was not particularly eager to see me, but I finally convinced her that we should briefly meet. She agreed on conditions set by her family. First, we'd meet at a public tearoom. Second, her grandmother would join us there. While the meeting provided closure, it did little more than that. The intervening year had not been kind to either of us and whatever we'd once had was gone. Before we went our separate ways she told me she was now engaged and would soon be married to her cousin.

My final Afghan memory came as I was waiting in the Kabul airport for the flight that would take us to Teheran. The airport was teeming with young militants in khakis, all carrying Kalashnikovs. They were giving us a hard time about trying to leave, and we were all tense as they tore through our luggage. They seemed eager to find contraband or anything else that they could detain us for. The tensest moment came when one young guy tore open a female volunteer's backpack. He dumped a pile of tampons out on the table. Then he jumped back, startled, and started shouting and waving his gun around. Our translator looked every bit as freaked as the young soldier. He stammered as he translated, pointing at the pile, "He wants to know what those things with the fuses are!"

5. To Go to Togo

The day before we left for Togo, I severely sprained my ankle. I'd jumped a fence and landed on an unseen rock. The turn tore all the ligaments between my calf and foot.

The Texan doctor told me he could not sign off on my travel and that I would have to bail out of Peace Corps. I explained that I had already waited to get into the program for the six months after my original Tonga offer. Then I had to leave Afghanistan only five months in. And I had finished this latest three month training program only the day before. Not only was the training difficult, it was the second training program I had finished in that same year. So I wasn't about to call it quits.

Being a tough Texan, he understood. He signed off on my departure and I made the long trip over with my ankle raised and supported by the seat back tray. Some of the worst days came early in training when I found myself feverish with malaria. It comes with hallucinations, epic headaches, and terrible shits. I remember hobbling down to the pit latrine, only a hole in a cement slab. I had to raise my bum foot while I shat because it wouldn't take my weight. So I was trying to hit a little hole, while feverish, balanced on one foot.

A couple of weeks into training, they arranged for us to go to rural villages to stay with host families for a few days. My family stay remains vivid to this day. I arrived at my host's small, mud-walled compound with only a blue jerry can of clean water, a change of clothes and a toothbrush. A group of children immediately mobbed me and asked after the contents of the can. "White man's water," I replied. They were two of the perhaps twenty words I knew in the local dialect. It was the only common unit of communications we shared.

The kids mimicked getting a closer look at the water can. As soon as I handed it to them, they took off. I noticed an old women sitting on a stone, stirring a large steaming kettle. She was staring at me, showing a toothless grin. Her left leg was grotesquely distorted by huge folds of flesh. Though I'd never seen it before, I knew it as the sign of late-stage elephantiasis. As I looked on, she reached into the pot and lifted out the head of a full grown dog. Starting there, she proceeded to peel the boiled coat from the entire body.

The children returned about then and handed me my jerry can. It was empty. It meant I'd be without clean water for the rest of my stay.

They were a lovely family, if National Geographic primitive, living a Stone Age existence within 30 miles of the regional capital, Lama Kara. The eldest boy was a student at the Catholic high school we were staying in during our training. When he got home from school, he acted as a bridge across our language divide. He was also able to bridge the past and future. He had his weekday foot in Lama Kara. The other was planted in his family's remote rural compound. He got home from school dressed in the formal outfit of a western-oriented student at a French lycée. Within an hour, he'd stripped down to traditional dress. He sported nothing more than a leather thong over a blue Speedo. In fairness he also had a couple of strands of beaded bracelets he wore above his elbows and knees. It was Lute season, he informed me, a wrestling rite of passage for all Kabyé boys his age.

When evening came, the family gathered in my small circular mud room. It took me a moment to realize that this was actually the head of the family's room. He'd vacated to give me the comfort of their best space. This was the only room with a table. Chairs and stools began to materialize as other family member arrived.

A thin six-foot high circular wall framed the compound. Built into it were a half dozen or so round, straw topped rooms. The rooms each had a single door pointed towards the central courtyard. Several also had a single window, about one foot square, pointing to the world outside.

The household head came in and delivered words which the boy translated as a warm greeting. He went on to say that I had arrived at an auspicious moment. They were celebrating his son's wrestling ceremony, and my arrival seemed like a good omen. Then he spoke about the special treat we had in store for us tonight in the form of the delectable ceremonial food.

We would share their boiled dog to ensure his son's strength through the week of wrestling. The food was a kind of talisman lending magical strength over the coming days. At this point, one of his wives entered carrying the dog I'd seen, now chopped up on a plate. As the father lifted a huge shank and moved it towards my plate, I felt my bile rise. I smiled as best I could and held my hands up. "No, really, thanks – I couldn't. I'm not really hungry."

He looked at me baffled for a moment and then shook his head. A smile crossed his lips and as he spoke and his son translated. "He says you have to have something – if only a small taste. He is offering you the finest bit." I watched as he jabbed the dog's testicles onto his fork. Then he dropped them on my plate.

"I, I couldn't," I stammered. Then, seeing the expectancy in all the faces, I severed the ball sack into two. I offered half of the delicacies back. "I couldn't take all the best pieces," I demurred, popping the remaining testicle into my mouth.

The gag reflect was overpowering. Knowing the ball was coming back out, I thought fast. I snapped my fingers and made a face of great surprise, pretending I saw someone unexpected at the door. While everyone looked to see who was coming, I spat the ball into my hand and lobbed it out the little square window. The only problem was, no one was looking at the door. Not a single head had turned. They were all starring at the strangest sight they'd ever seen. Me, a crazy white guy, snapping his fingers and pointing wildly at the door. Oh, and spitting a gonad into my hand and throwing their ceremonial dinner out the window.

I mentioned that Peace Corps dropped me off in Kpagouda with a thin foam mattress. What I failed to mention was that they gave me a small kerosene fridge as well. Before I had the sense to turn this expensive luxury into a closet, I made ice for a while. Kodjo, my neighbor/helper, had never seen ice before. So I handed him a piece. He screamed as soon as he touched it. Then he flung it away, sure it had burned his skin.

When he saw that the ice created neither a burn mark nor any lasting pain, he grabbed another piece. This one he put into a bottle cap so he wouldn't have to hold it. He ran out of the house and up the street saying he wanted to terrorize his friends. "They'll think that I'm a devil with this new burning/non-burning thing," he shouted as he left. He returned within minutes in shocked puzzlement. "How did you do that?" he demanded. I asked him to clarify. He showed me the puddle in the bottle cap, saying, "You know. You turned the hot rock into water when I left."

And in the spirit of sorcerers, one more gris-gris story comes to mind. This was Thanksgiving, my first year. The US Ambassador had invited the volunteers to dinner at his home in the capital. But I was newly at post and it was a long haul back down to the coast. It was also the same day as a nearby 'sorcerers' event', that took place once every five years. So I decided not to go to Lomé for the Ambassador's Thanksgiving party. I went to the Kara gris-gris festival instead.

The hippie heyday was behind us in the late seventies, but some vestiges of it remained. In particular, pot use had bloomed, spreading its literal and figurative seed. Its roots were well planted and wide spread. The industry was even alive and well in Togo, as we found the first night we arrived. We smoked so much that our associate director told us that if we didn't stop doing drugs he'd throw the whole lot of us out. Somehow, the admonition was not enough to create much behavior change.

My friend John was as much of a toker as I was. And he too had decided to forego Thanksgiving in the capital. He decided to join me at the gris-gris festival instead. A neighboring UN volunteer came along as well.

We got to the hill where the gris-gris practitioners display their skills to one another. John asked us if we wanted to get stoned. The UN guy signaled that he didn't. Looking at all the bizarre sights, I decided not to as well. I was afraid that adding the incoherent fog of marijuana to the scene might be a little more than I could handle. It was, for me, a rare exercise of self-restraint.

We watched wizards dance wearing nothing but beads and bands and body paint. They had live toads stuffed head first into their mouths. The fogs kicked like they wanted to crawl all the way down the sorcerers' throats. There were others who pierced their bodies with needles, knives, and lances. They drove these objects through their cheeks and through the loose skin of arms and thighs. I walked around completely straight seeing sights that made me feel like I was stoned out of my mind.

A few days later the merry-makers returned from the capital. They told me that a group of volunteers had gathered for a Thanksgiving pre-party. The party included pot in smokable form as well as some baked into brownies. As the party broke up, someone snagged the brownies. They brought them along to the Ambassador's where they ended up on the Thanksgiving desert table. What happened after that has since become Peace Corps legend. In fact, I continued to hear the story told in different Peace Corps offices for more than twenty years.

An unsuspecting volunteer took a brownie off the table thinking it was a regular desert. She ended up so stoned that she stripped naked on the dance floor. She shimmied and shook her way up to others there and ranted about how much she wanted to have their babies. The young woman was psycho-vac'ed the following day.

There was an immediate investigation into how the brownies got to the Ambassador's in the first place. It soon implicated more than twenty volunteers. The policy technically called for their dismissal, but many argued that the program ramifications were too great. So the administration settled for letters swearing they would not use drugs again.

Now back to the UN volunteer who had gone to the festival with John and me. He ended up making a big deal about John's lighting up when he next saw our Peace Corps Director. The leadership decided that, while they couldn't lose twenty volunteers, they could make an example out of one. John was the only person to get thrown out of Peace Corps for Thanksgiving drug use that year.

I learned the importance of having a Plan B the easy way; by not having one. I was assigned to a new USAID project in Togo. Its stated goal, training oxen to pull plows, is formally known as 'animal traction'.

Peace Corps sent twenty of us off to Texas to spend a month learning how to get bulls to take the yoke. That, unfortunately, often required us to 'convince' them they wanted to learn to plow. We learned to corner the lumbering beasts using whatever means we had available. Then we'd get a rope on their heads below their horns and another rope on one of their hind legs. This allowed a third person to drop the yoke on the first ox's neck and to lock the securing mechanism. Then we'd start in on the second one.

Once we yoked the pair together, what followed was a down right raucous affair. Our 'beef', as we called them, would invariably break free of us after a snorting rant. They would then race off and smash headlong into trees. Or they'd get themselves completely turned around so that one ox's body was on each side of the yoke. It looked cartoonish to see animals dragging volunteers down dirt roads. Others were gored and tossed in the air like rag dolls. It was all very frightening and great fun, and more difficult than I ever would have thought.

On a work front, I was having problems introducing beef to yokes in Kpagouda. What surprised me more was how reluctant the famers were to use them. In Kpagouda, like most of Togo, farming consisted of whacking at hard-packed soil with little short-handled hoes. The farmers bent in half, knees locked, to strike the ground. They bobbed like those toy birds that continuously peek for water after you start them with a push. It was back-breaking work.

These farmers were the very definition of 'substance farmers'. They worked every daylight minute of the planting season. But even so they were barely able to harvest enough millet to tide them over for the year. Sometimes they weren't even able to do that. 'So sorry, Anasara' (local language word for 'outsider'), they informed me, 'but we don't have time to see if this crazy idea of getting oxen to pull plows will work'. They were too busy making sure their families didn't starve. And they were happy enough to keep doing things the way they had been doing them for several thousand years.

The more I got to know these men, the more I came to appreciate their perspective. First, the soil of northern Togo is densely packed red volcanic laterite. It actually looks more like pebbles in concrete than dirt. Second, the rains come in such brief intervals that the planting season is a matter of precise timing. And third, they plant yams, their primary food source, in three foot high earthen mounds. No matter how well trained your oxen are, they'll never be able to plow the soil into three foot mounds.

And then there was the fact that what I was proposing they farm was a completely foreign product – upland rice. I explained that there was a good market for rice in the capital. We'd sell it there and then they'd have enough cash to buy the yams they hadn't produced themselves.

Further, I would help them form cooperatives and then give them two bulls on lay-away, to be paid off as their income increased. By the time I finished explaining, I myself was questioning the distant agricultural expert who had come up with the cockamamie plan.

When I told my USAID project officer about the farmers' resistance to our plan, he said, "No problem. That's what PL480 is for." I had never heard the term before, but said I'd check it out.

PL480 stands for 'Public Law 480'. It is a law better known as 'Food for Peace'. Food for Peace is one of the few proven, long-standing development activities run by USAID. It is effective because it provides both the U.S. farmers and the aid recipients with a win. Here's how it works: The US government buys up surplus US grain, and other over-produced commodities. These purchases bolster the domestic market price by constraining the supply. The surplus is then given away at foreign disaster sites. We package it in those big bags emblazoned with the symbol of two hands clasped in front of an American flag.

Turns out there was a PL480 program in Togo. The guy running the program for USAID agreed to meet. After I explained my farmers' dilemma, he agreed to keep enough PL 480 on hand to guarantee their food security. In fact, he said, he had a truck coming up my way so he'd have it swing by and make a preliminary delivery. I couldn't believe my good fortune. "One thing, though," he said, extending his hand. "You have to promise not to use the food for anything other than as a backup food supply for the ox-plowing farmers." I shook and said we had a deal.

A couple weeks later I was out working with my newly invigorated farmers. A villager pulled up on a bicycle and breathlessly said that a bunch of people were looking for me. He added that a truck was waiting at the Ag extension office. "Big truck," he said, widening his eyes in a comical look of surprise, like he's never seen a truck before. I kicked my recently arrived motorcycle to life and skidded my way back into town.

I found the people who were looking for me. They were among a large group of villagers who had come out to gawk at an enormous 18 wheeler. The vehicle was so big that it blocked the entire road. The truck driver spoke rapidly, miming the movement of the contents of his rig into a nearby building. The building was the Ag extension office storage shed.

My friend Sebou, the extension agent, came up and told me that the driver had a rig full of PL480 food. His instructions were to deliver it to no one but me. It took me awhile to understand that he was talking about the entire shipment – about 500 cubic feet of food. And then the driver informed me he needed to see it under lock and key...and watched over by a guard. "One hundred bags are the food you requested," the driver informed me. "You have to store the rest for us to distribute in case of an emergency. But the cost of your getting part of the food is that you have to keep the rest of it safe."

Holy shit, I'm thinking, 500 cubic feet of food, plus now I need to find a guard? Anyway, what ended up happening was that I had this huge pile of guarded food. So with the certainty of food for the coming year, the farmers agreed to use the oxen. They had a backup plan. But while they now had a backup plan, as it played out, I was the one who needed one. This is what happened:

The previous year had been a bad one for rain. By the middle of the dry season a lot of people in my village were running out of food. Of course everyone in the area knew about my warehouse full of food. It wasn't long before some of those who were hungry showed up at my door. I explained to each of them the promise I had made. "Sorry, it isn't my food to give away."

I remember one time a young woman came and held a baby in outstretched arm. "I know you are not giving us any food, and I don't want the food for myself. But do you think you could spare something for my starving baby?" Her husband, who was with her, looked embarrassed by his inability to provide for his family. He stood a little ways off, turning on occasion to look at me while wringing his hands. I shook my head and repeated my oath to the PL-480 Man. She met my explanations with a look of incomprehension, then incredulity, then disdain.

The scene, often repeated, always ended in quiet despair. I remained uncompromising, determined not to give away any food regardless of the need. The begging continued for a while, but people eventually came to realized that I wasn't going to budge.

About the same time, I noticed a certain wariness in my interactions with the villagers. It seemed my friends had seen a new aspect of this American...and what they saw was deeply troubling.

At the end of the season all but one of my cooperatives proved able to cover their food needs through the sale of their rice. The amount of food needed by the single unsuccessful cooperative was small. It didn't put a dent in the enormous pile of meal-filled sacks. One day around this time, Sebou came knocking at my door. "I have bad news about the remaining food," he said. "It's all gone bad...it's rotten. Filled with maggots. We have to figure out how to dispose of it. Come and have a look."

I marched up to the warehouse for an inspection. Sure enough, every bag had succumbed to the local humidity and burst. Maggots teemed from the open grain sacks. I shook my head in dismay and arranged with a cattle feed lot to come and haul the wasted food away.

When the truck arrived, a fire brigade line of local farmers passed the rotted meal bags hand to hand. One man slipped and the bag fell, spraying corn meal all around. An old woman raced forward and began sweeping the meal into her wash basin. "I know you won't let us touch it, but this is for my chickens," she barked, unable to hide her fury. "Or is that also something else you won't allow?"

To bring a little closure here, let me cut to how the story ends. Two years later I left Togo and returned to the States. I got a temporary job working as what's called a 'Staging Coordinator' for the Peace Corps. Staging refers to the brief time new trainees are in the U.S. before heading off to their posts. It allows them time to complete administrative details, like getting all the required shots. But we also ran new recruits through a few activities designed to give them a taste of the years ahead.

I made my PL480 saga into a three part tale. I stopped at key points to ask what the recruits thought about the problems that I posed. For example, I stopped at the point at which the farmers said they couldn't take up oxen plowing. Then I explained that they were afraid to risk their food supply. At the end, I asked them if I had done the right thing in steadfastly denying the villagers my food. I asked what I could have done to achieve a better outcome. By then, I'd had a long time to think about it myself and I had staked out my position. In retrospect I realized I had made two errors, the second more significant than the first. First, I had accepted many times more food than I had requested and I had no real idea what to do with it. I should have at least checked with someone at USAID. Second, I had failed to engage community leaders in any part of the process. I now know I should have engaged them at every step along the way.

A more perceptive, less head strong volunteer would have understood. The only way to make things work in an African village, or in development anywhere, is to have community support. In that sense, I had sown the seeds of my own failure from the start. It was a difficult lesson to learn. It helped that I had the outlet of Staging to tell my Ancient Mariner tale. I can only hope it spared somebody the woes I had bought upon myself.

6. Kimendo Road

I mentioned that I saw Peace Corps as a 'writing scholarship'. And also that I knew I wasn't much of a writer. I was hoping that Peace Corps would give me time to write a book - and a subject to write about.

My efforts produced my first decent manuscript called The Kimendo Road. It relates how the first paved road to a village very like Kpagouda brings unexpected change. While I never even submitted it to a publisher, Nancy claims to this day that it is the reason she married me. I guess it suggested I wasn't only a systems geek. Having a condo, car and a steady job probably didn't hurt either.

I enjoyed writing the book. I copied it out long hand into brown paper notebooks they sold for school children. I typed it up when I returned to the U.S., hiding out in my upstairs bedroom, too disoriented to re-integrate. The people I showed it to liked it, or liked it enough to finish it. More than I could say for most of the stuff I've written since.

I borrowed a lot from my experiences there. For example, my snake stories. One day I showed up at a farmer's house and noticed that he had a goat tried to a nearby tree. When I asked why it was there, he told me he was having a big party the following day and he invited me to come. (No one had a watch in Kpagouda back then. They told time by pointing at an angle of the sun).

The following day I rode back at the appointed time and found my farmer sitting on a stump looking glum. When I asked what was wrong, he hooked his thumb over to the tree where the goat had been. I spent a moment trying to figure out how he'd managed to tie a ten foot python to the tree – by a rope down its throat. "No party," the farmer confirmed. "Snake ate the goat."

There was also the time a local snake skin trader announced his visit by clapping at my front door. Upon entering, he laid out a roll of very long python skins – some reaching fifteen feet or more. When I asked him where they came from, he told me he'd caught the snakes himself.

I'd seen a local farmer run a much smaller python through the head with a six foot spear. The not yet dead snake wound its body up the spear shaft and constricted until the shaft broke into pieces. Then it wiggled itself back into the woods.

Given how hard it seemed to be to kill these things, I asked how he went about doing it himself. He said, "It's not that hard. I just follow them until I find the hole they live in. Once I see that they are in there, I take a long knife and tie it to my naked thigh. Then I put my leg into the hole and wait for the snake to swallow it. When it gets up to my crotch, it can't go any higher. So all I have to do is to drag the snake out of the hole, and just keep cutting it down the side the whole while."

I wrote the stories above over the last few months. I initially wrote the fictionalized version thirty-five years ago. I had not seen the words below since I wrote them.

=========

Before the road crew arrived that evening Chunga devised a plan. Moussa came in behind the noisy group and took his habitual place at the bar. Each time Chunga walked by she said something to him, casual, pleasant. He answered her questions simply, never asking any of his own. Then, by accident, she stumbled on a subject that seemed to jolt him out of his silence. His face, a patchwork of tiny scars all but invisible from a distance, created a beautiful pattern on his cheeks and highlighted the intensity of his already bright eyes.

Chunga asked him what tribe he came from and about the meaning of his scars. "My father died the day I was born," he answered quietly. "He became the python that lived in the scared forest beside my village. My face is marked with the lines of the python in his honor."

As she looked the pattern became clear. She could see the small intricately woven triangles of the enormous snakes. "It's beautiful," she said as the man beside Moussa broke into the conversation.

"In my village we kill pythons", he said proudly. "We have a special way and its very dangerous work left only to the bravest men."

"How do you do it", Moussa asked with more interest than Chunga had ever seen him express before.

"You go in the morning, before the serpent has eaten. You go naked, only wearing a belt. You put a long knife in the belt and let the blade hang along your thigh. Then you put your foot into the python's hole and you wait." The man ordered another beer for effect. Moussa and Chunga urged the man to continue. "The snake comes out," he said after filling his glass "and he begins to swallow your foot. He swallows slowly. It takes a long time, and while he is swallowing you must not move because if you move he will come out of the hole and kill you.' He took a long pull on his drink. "Then, when the snake reaches your hips he can't go any further. You slip the knife from your belt, he has already swallowed the blade, and you cut the snake open down the whole length of your leg. It is the only way to kill those big snakes."

Moussa stood looking at the man for a moment. "We have a trick to play with the python too, but we'd never kill it. When the old snake dies in the scared forest, young men in my village have to go find another to take its place. And do you know how we catch it?"

The men in the bar had grown quiet listening to the story of killing the python and now they waited to hear how one could be caught. "When I was young, our old python died and I was sent with the other boys to bring home another," he began. "The elders never told us how you catch a huge python, they only said 'go out and get one and don't come back until you have it.' The bigger they are the more honor there is in bringing them back, but of course also the more danger.

One of my friends had an idea. "It took us three days but we found the hole of a python that was well known in the area for the size of the animals it killed. Then we went out and bought a sheep," he said with a mischievous smile. "A big fat sheep. We took the sheep to the hole and tied it to a nearby tree with a strong cord and then we waited. The sheep cried during the night and in the morning, instead of the sheep we had a giant python attached to the tree by a stout cord which ran down its throat."

Moussa burst into laughter as he remembered the story. The men in the bar clapped and cheered. They ordered beers for Moussa and the man beside him and they repeated the story all night in the bar, seeming never to tire of it.

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Read more of The Kimendo Road:

By the end of my tour in Peace Corps I had a completed my manuscript, Kimendo Road. But I also left Togo as a rather dispirited volunteer. This was much like the feeling I had when leaving Afghanistan, but for different reasons. I'd worked hard to make the farm cooperatives successful, but it still felt like a very uphill battle when I left. On the plus side, some of the groups embraced using oxen and saw promise in the work. But, others focused on the short-term benefit by butchering and chowing down on their cows.

Peace Corps asked me to lead the training of the next several groups of volunteers. I thought that suggested that I at least understood the job. But I could never shake the feeling that ox plowing in Togo might not ever take hold. So I was happily surprised by some news I read a year after I returned to the States. Togo's President, General Gnassingbé Eyadéma, named one of my cooperatives 'best cooperative of the year'. He awarded each member a new bicycle at a ceremony held in the national stadium in the capital, Lomé.

Then a couple of years ago, I bumped into a woman wearing a shirt that said Peace Corps Togo. I asked if she'd been a volunteer. She said she had and we got to talking. When she asked what program I'd been in, I told her – Animal Traction, teaching oxen to pull plows. Her face turned into a puzzled frown. "We don't have any program like that," she said. I felt a crest-fallen thinking about how hard many of us had worked. "I mean why would they need it?" she asked. "Everyone in Togo uses oxen to pull plows."

My time in Togo reminds me of something an old Canadian guy said. He picked me up on Prince Edward Island, where I was hitch hiking while still in high school. Looking out at the flat brown ground against the flat gray sky, I asked him what there was to do in PEI. "Well," he answered rubbing his chin, "In the summer, we fish and we fuck. And in the winter we can't fish anymore."

So it seemed to me it was in Togo. The days were long and repetitive. But without exception there was always one thing a day that stuck out. One day it was a fire jumping from one grass roof to another so quickly that within minutes every roof in town was ablaze. Another it was a rabid dog chased down and killed by fearless men who knew they needed to rid themselves of the menace in their midst. Once it was the 'flying snake' of Togolese legend they told me had flown into the village the previous night. Westerners knew these didn't really exist – until I found it forty feet up, where they pointed it out in the tree. Endless Nothing, then One Thing. Then lots of nothing again. And in the winter, we can't fish.

So it was that the gorilla stories came about. Being West Africa, there were few non-domesticated animals left around. Everything was food. So how was it that the baboon population seemed to thrive? My cooperative in Sola was in the high hill country, where farmers worked only in woven reed penis caps. Here was ancient Africa, and the old traditions thrived.

The Sola still practiced mass male circumcision. All boys between twelve and seventeen stand in a public line to have their foreskins removed. They did this without the benefit of pain relief and if they so much as flinched they were driven from the tribe. The year I was there, one boy shrieked and ran as he was cut. The villagers later found him hanging from a tree. The general belief was that it was his family's response to shame.

One day after working the morning in the fields, my farmers invited me to share the noon day meal. Noticing more excitement then was generally the case, I asked what it was all about. They told me we were going to have a special treat. The previous day, a village woman was out collecting firewood on a nearby hill. A baboon came upon her. It attacked and raped her. The entire village immediately gave chase. Once they trapped and killed it, they decided it was lunch.

But before they could serve the meal, an argument broke out over tribal taboos and rules. The group that wanted to eat the meat said they could eat any animals that were covered in body hair (they themselves having hairless flesh). Those who didn't eat baboon said it was taboo to eat anything with human genitalia. When asked about my views, I quickly said I agreed with the genitalia clause. Then I pulled my shirt off to show that my whole body is covered in body hair. I added that I hoped their appetites for hairy quasi-humans ended with baboons.

The last ape story happened just weeks before I left for good. I was training the new volunteers in the high village of Defale. The town was suffering from a prolonged drought and the farmers were getting desperate. The village headman decided to call in a witch doctor. The sorcerer told them that the only way to end the drought was to sacrifice a baboon. The trainees and I watched as the local men suited up to go bring in a sacrificial ape.

About twenty men left the village carrying bows and arrows along with a variety of clubs. They returned two hours later bellowing and banging on pots. They were chasing a full grown male baboon. The ape darted into a nearby stand of woods while the men encircled the little patch, keeping up their din. The frantic baboon, seeing no alternative, decided it had to charge the line. We watched as over a hundred pounds of biting teeth and solid muscle went straight at a single man. The brave villager stood his ground and the others joined as quickly as they could. They managed to subdue the powerful creature. And, though I was there, I still can't imagine how.

Once they had it subdued, the villagers tied it to a tree. They then beat it to tatters using everything they had. Once dead and mutilated, they shoved an old army helmet on its head and pushed a pipe into what had been its mouth. Then the whole village joined in dancing around it for an hour. There are twenty American volunteers who witnessed this. I swear what happened next was that it began to rain.

7. Homecoming

My return, after three years in Peace Corps, was more difficult than I would have imagined. The first inkling I got was when my friend Ralph and I stopped over in Paris on our way home. I guess I thought I was someone special for having made it through what I considered an ordeal. I assumed that everyone would be fascinated by my tales (it appears that I still think that). But person after person tuned out my self-absorbed banter. When Ralph saw I looked crestfallen, he uncharacteristically offered unsolicited advice. "You know what you could try, Mike?" He asked me. "Come up with two or three of your favorite stories and then try one out the next time you get into a conversation. Just one. See how it plays out. If they are interested, they'll give you an opportunity to tell a second one." It was damn good advice.

My second re-entry challenge occurred when I got home. Everything in America seemed so overly abundant and excessively clean. I reacted with dumbstruck awe to supermarket packed with out of season fruits. I couldn't process the vast expanse of manicured lawn of the National Mall. I made a hurried retreat to my old room in my parent's house under the legitimate pretext of typing up my manuscript.

About the only thing I'd decided was that I needed to go to graduate school. A Master's degree in disaster response stuck me as a critical credential. I somehow managed to get into all the schools to which I applied. I went to each in the order of my interest in them to see what they had to offer.

The University of Virginia was my first pick. I went down there to talk about what I hoped to study, but the representative I was speaking to looked at me askance. "If you come to this program you'll take the course of study as laid out. There is no such thing as 'disaster management'. We teach a curriculum that has stood us well over the test of time." He might have added 'in keeping with Mr. Jefferson's vision for his venerable institution'. I presume he felt that was self-evident enough to be left out.

I got the same line, though in gentler and more accommodating terms, from all the other schools on my list. That is, until I got to the last one. The Dean at American University, nodded when I said I wanted to do disaster management. "Would you be focusing on natural or technological disaster?" he asked. "Because we'd make you choose."

It was a brilliant response, and I was immediately sold. He was extemporizing, as it turned out. They didn't have a disaster management program (no one did at the time). But, true to his word, he built one that satisfied my request.

Forced to pick, I chose technological disasters. I further specialized in the brand new field of environmental risk analysis. I had the good fortune of working for Dr. William Rowe, the author of 'The Anatomy of Risk', the field's cornerstone. He is now considered the science's preeminent pioneer. He was a nice guy but his brilliance made me cower. Most of the time I could hardly understand what he was saying. I often felt like a dog tied behind a fast moving truck.

In truth, I never should have gotten into the program, in part because Calculus was a prerequisite. I didn't know the first thing about calculus. I approached Dr. Rowe to ask that he waive the rule for me. He looked at me like I was something unpleasant he found sticking to his shoe. Even so, I persevered. I explained my motivation for taking on technological disasters. Then I said that people no longer needed to understand calculus to deal with our day-to-day world. I explained that I could solve calculus equations without understanding how it worked. Then I entered a quadratic equation into my TI-80 calculator exactly as he'd written it on the board. I pressed 'enter'...and voilà, the correct answer popped right out. He said he thought it was a ridiculous demonstration. Nevertheless, he agreed to admit me to the program.

I also realized that getting good at the science of probability was key to determining risk. Knowing that I was as bad at probability as I was at calculus, I once again turned to my computer tricks. I found a mainframe programming language called General Purpose Systems Simulator (GPSS). It turned out that I could program GPSS to handle my probability questions. I set it up to run the scenarios in question hundreds of thousands of times. Then all I had to do was to print the distribution out.

I had also landed a job at the University working the Department of Continuing Education. In 1981 they asked me to create a new adult education program, called Personal Computing. It was the same year IBM released its first personal computer, and I knew nothing about them at the time. In fact, I was still getting my feet wet with mainframes, punching cards and submitting them in stacks. But these forces coalesced and I ended up with a solid footing in computer technology. I bought my first personal computer, an IBM PCjr, when they released it in 1983. It cost me a month's wages.

The big news in disasters back then was the emerging saga of abandoned toxic waste sites. Congress passed a huge spending bill to cover the costs of cleaning up these sites. A place called Love Canal became its milk carton poster child. That year I completed an independent study on Superfund and Love Canal. I even had a few meetings with Lois Gibbs – who got the credit for getting Congress to enact the Superfund. By then I had decided on my job goal: I would bring computer automation to Superfund.

I managed to locate the Superfund office in an underground garage in the EPA's Waterside Mall. I cornered one of the executives and explained my degree and my commitment to their work. He told me they weren't hiring. I said no problem, I'll work for free. He gave me a long studied look and offered me his hand. Then he asked me to come back in two weeks.

When I came back as scheduled, he was expecting me and took me to another office. That person let me know that the personnel department had nixed the deal. "President Reagan has ordered a government-wide Reduction in Force, a RIF. We can't bring new people on – even someone willing to work for free – during a RIF."

I felt lost. I didn't have a job. I didn't even have a girlfriend. And I was running out of money. Worse, none of the environmentalists I spoke to could imagine why they would want someone with a degree in risk assessment.

I spent some time polishing up the manuscript I had written set in the early days of the Afghan war. Then I found hourly work in a place that supported litigation by reviewing documents by the truck load. The idea was to search the documents for any occurrence of a litigant's name. Every morning I'd get a list of names and a few cartons of documents. Then I'd shift through page after page circling any of the names I saw. It was a Second Circle of Hell job. It required a college degree but it paid only minimum wage. It was a home for lost souls, and we all made the best of it we could.

The only bright spot came the day I got a letter from an editor at Penguin Books. She said she had read the sample of Jihad I'd sent and she wanted to read the rest of it. During my book research, I had figured out there was a good chance the U.S. was supplying weapons to the Mujahideen. I also realized that the Afghans would never win while the Russians controlled the air. It seemed to me that the recently disclosed Stinger missile would be the ideal weapon to turn the tide. The story line of the book followed U.S. agents getting Stingers to the Mujahideen. And years later, the scenario turned to have been true.

With the letter from Penguin in hand, I sought out a literary agent in Georgetown. I signed a contract engaging her to handle the negotiations for the rights to Jihad. Months went by without a word. Finally the agent contacted me and said she had heard back from the editor. "I'll read you her note," she said. "Dear Michael – Didn't like it as much as I hoped I would. Dictated but not signed by editor name] Penguin Books". Then my agent let me know that she didn't handle fiction and didn't see any point in peddling my work. I was shattered. In truth though, I wasn't especially crazy about the book either. I put it on the shelf next to [The Kimendo Road.

Earlier I said 'this is about people who don't realize their goals, and how they learn to cope'. That was me with my primary ambition of writing. But before I jump into that, it is important to reflect on how much effort I'd given it. Malcom Gladwell estimated that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to develop 'expertise'. He said that estimate is independent of the skill or field. While I wasn't anywhere close to meeting the 10,000 hours, I estimated I had at least a third of that. This means that I had an average of two hours of writing every day for six years, so I was really giving it a shot.

When I started, I couldn't write more than five pages with a correct story arc (beginning, middle and end). By the end, I could write several hundred pages that held together and told a tale. Even better, I could do it without falling into the trap of 'leaving the gun on the mantel'. That's writing jargon for throwing in irrelevant or misleading details. My basic problem was that my characters were paper thin which also made them hard to like. My other problem was my undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome. It made it so I couldn't even see the problem because I didn't care about the characters myself.

It wasn't as though I wasn't given hints as to my deficiencies. While this is a bit out of chronology, here's an example. My wife Nancy - my most ardent fan - gave me feedback when she finished my third manuscript, The Left Hand of God. "I can't believe you killed the dog," she said, shaking her head. "He was by far the most likeable character."

So by the time Penguin rejected me, I knew that I could write a readable full length fictional manuscript. I thought of this as 'being able to run a marathon'. But I also knew there was a world of difference between being able to run a marathon and being able to _win_ one. And here _winning_ meant being able to write well enough to generate a reasonable income. Further, I realized that I had only trained to 'complete'. Winning would never be within my reach.

Here's what I did: I put my goal of becoming a writer 'on hold'. That way I could focus on something else without actually admitting that I had changed my goal. I wonder how much this holds true for others who have faced this dilemma. That is, among those who have realized they were not going to achieve their stated goal. I thought 'ok, accept the fact that you are not going to make your living as a novelist'. Then I decided that I would go out and make enough money so that I wouldn't have to make a living a novelist. If I made enough money first, I could just _be_ a novelist. Problem solved.

If I had believed in my own potential enough, I might have been happy as a starving artist. But I knew that my problems were more of a 'talent issue' than a problem of 'being discovered'. And besides, I needed money right away. I needed food and a place to sleep. And I wanted to have a family at some point. So I needed to be a viable wage earner. I'd finished my Peace Corps 'writing fellowship' and it hadn't panned out. The time had come to accept that and move on. Now I would concentrate on making enough dough so that I could pick writing up again somewhere down the road.

[Here I'm going to geek out for a page or two...to skip it look for the note 'End Geek']. I eventually got a call from a small, minority owned, government contractor by the name of J.A. Reyes. They said, "We have no idea what that risk business is about. But we like your experience with Department of Transportation data. And you appear to have good computer experience." They offered me a job to build a database application, the first and only I would write myself. The DoT wanted a national standard for roadside truck inspections. Defining and building that tool took me to a host of highway patrol offices in a bunch of states. I called the new application SAFETYNET. It was in full national use by the time I left the program in 1986.

Thirty years later (today) I looked it up online and found a reference to it on DoT's website. "SAFETYNET is a database management system that allows entry, access, analysis, and reporting of data from driver/vehicle inspections, crashes, compliance reviews, assignments, and complaints. It is operated at State safety agencies and Federal Divisions and interfaces with Aspen, SAFER, MCMIS, and State systems." I am sure that the name is the only remnant of my original system. Still, it is rewarding to see that even a little of my work remains in place. I loved my time at J.A Reyes but it was a hand-to-mouth operation. My own work seemed solid and stable but I saw constant insecurity and turn over in the other teams. After a little more than three years, I decided to move on.

The next company I joined was a total disaster, but I hit it at a fascinating time. The Davis Group was a newly minted minority firm with a government contract at the Washington Navy Yard. The Navy Yard was a major hub on what was known at the time as ARPANET, the direct precursor of the Internet. They gave me a 'data scope' and told me to start reading packets as they arrived. I was to check them against a set of specifications that included things called TCP/IP, FTP and SMTP. This was at a time when these specifications were still very new.

I found myself involved in a major competition between two government support teams. One team was the Defense Data Network (or DDN), and the other was my ARPANET team. The Navy's Admiralty Board announced it would select one of our technical approaches. The winner would become the foundation of the new 'Internet'. The loser would pack up and go home.

I awaited the outcome from my cube in the warehouse office next door to the Board meeting. An aside, my family still teases me about how I had to answer the phone there: "NARDAC Code 42. This is not a secure line." When the Board announced in favor of the DDN, I immediately feared the worst. But within the hour they followed the initial announcement with a second one. All ARPANET team members would continue working, but we would be part of the DDN team. So yes, I guess I am joining Al Gore in saying 'I was there at the beginning of the internet'.

Two other things that happened at that time, the second far more important than the first. First, a colleague on the ARPANET project was teaching at Bowie State. He asked if I wanted to join him there. I taught graduate level Data Communications and Database Management classes. I worked out of the University of Maryland system's offices at Fort Meade, which houses the NSA. [End Geek]

The most important thing that has ever happened to me was meeting Nancy. Nancy too had been a Togo volunteer several years after I left. She had lived in the same house as my closest neighbor, work colleague and good friend, Ed Porter. When Nancy returned, she reached out to Ed offering news of the village. Ed knew I'd be interested to catch up on local gossip so he cascaded the invitation down me.

I met Ed at the Department of Agriculture and we headed towards the bar where we'd agreed to meet. Before we left the building, I noticed a woman bustling down a cavernous federal corridor. She walked with a fluid grace and a clacking of high heels. I pointed her out as she turned a corner in front of us. Although I had never seen Nancy before, I knew she didn't work at Ag. Still, I said with absolute certainty, "That's Nancy right there." Ten minutes later when we caught up with her at the bar, it turned out I was right.

We sat at an outside table in the latter part of June. Nancy turned the pages of the thick photo album she had brought along. Ed got up to use the toilet after our umpteen pitcher of beer. I turned the page to see a photo of three gorgeous naked women. The photo showed them from behind as they held hands and leapt into a quarry some thirty feet below. I was particularly taken by the figure Nancy pointed to when I asked her which was her.

The next thing I knew, I blurted, "I'm considered something of a sexual wizard." The remark was not only a ridiculous lie, it was also an outrageously bad pick up line. Instead of laughing in my face and telling me to get a life, she surprised me with a drunken, dreamy smile. Then, with her elbow on the table, she rested her chin in her palm, cocked her head and whispered, "Oh yeah?"

Several hours later, Ed and I dropped Nancy at her apartment. As we left, he turned to me and said, "You realize you're going to marry her, right?" While the thought couldn't have been further from my mind, it turned out that he was right.

Nancy and I had our first date on Thursday evening before the Friday Fourth of July weekend in 1986. I took her to a popular rooftop Sushi place in trendy Adams-Morgan. I ordered a large Sapporo beer in a fancy can and I knocked the whole thing into my lap as soon as it arrived. Then, when the bill came, I went for a wallet only to discover I had left it home. I can't think of a single time I have left home without my wallet before or since, but I did it on our first date. She graciously picked up the tab.

The evening on the town ended at a cowboy bar across from the Adams-Morgan police station. We struck up a conversation with the guy sitting beside us and at about 2:00 in the morning he told us he was a cop. He said he was killing time before a 3:00am heroin bust. Then he invited us to tag along. We both wanted to join him, but we were beat, so Nancy invited me back to her place instead.

Three days later we were tubing down the Shenandoah River. A small rock forced our tubes apart and we came back together in an eddy below it. Nancy said, "You know, that was the farthest we've been apart since this date started Thursday." I didn't know it at the time, but in her I had found my life long soulmate.

After dating for a year or so, Nancy and I had gotten to the point where the topic of marriage was on the table. She'd already informed me that – if I were ever to propose and if she were to say 'yes' – it would be with a pre-condition. I would have to agree to accept that she and I would live abroad five years of every decade. That was because Peace Corps has a policy that says you can only stay at the agency for five consecutive years. Then you have to stay out as long as you were in before you are eligible to return. And Nancy had decided she wanted to make Peace Corps her career. A few months later, I agreed to the condition and we took the plunge.

Two nights later, we were staying with her grandmother in a small house on Staten Island. It was to be the only time I would have the opportunity to meet her grandmother because she died within the year. She and her deceased husband were a storied couple and the grandchildren worshiped them. Grandpa Wirth was a giant of a man in both his physical stature and in the grandchildren's view of him. A lifelong Brooklyn cop, he fit the mold of a swaggering, head-breaking, beat cop. And he was no stranger to racial slurs...particularly concerning blacks.

Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Ethel threw great parties. They were both generous and outgoing personalities. There were lots of stories. Like the one about the fireman neighbor who drove the rear of the giant hook-and-ladder. He had to leave a party early to make his midnight shift. Ethylene insisted he take their full pitcher of martinis along for the ride.

Anyway, back to that night on Staten Island. Once everyone else had gone to bed, Grandma Ethel broke out a final six-pack of Budweiser. She invited me to stick around and I said that I would. She popped two cans, gave me a funny look, and said, "So you don't have a problem with the blacks?" I immediately told her a story that my brother always told about when I first returned from Togo. I'd found a room in a house on Georgia Avenue in upper North West DC. When my brother came by to check it out, he asked me why I'd moved into the black section of town. I told him I hadn't noticed til he mentioned it.

"Well would it bother you to know that Nancy's black?" she asked me. Here let me state for the record that Nancy is as white as I am. There isn't the faintest trait of anything that would make you think she might be black. Ok, she has a terrific ass. But I mean aside from that. I chuckled and asked why she'd say a thing like that.

She told me a fascinating story that contradicted all the family history. The family lore said that they were all of Dutch descent. Ethel added that their relatives had migrated to Suriname. Her Dutch father then married 'a local colored girl'. Her mother, she told me, was full black, but her father was white, making Grandma Wirth half black. She asked if that changed my mind about anything. I quipped the well-known line, "Once you've had black, you never go back." She got a real kick out of that.

Several years later, I told my father-in-law what his mother had told me that night. He scoffed at me and said I was pulling his leg. But it stuck with him enough so that he repeated it to his sister, and then to his sister's kids. They were all convinced I'd made it up. That's the kind of reputation I have earned.

Sometime later, one enterprising family member searched the records at Ellis Island. She found indisputable proof that her Grandmother arrived in the U.S. with her Dutch father. They had come from Surinam. A registry note beside her name read 'full African black'.

Nancy and I have delighted in this connection ever since. Then, a short time ago, Nancy had business travel to Suriname. She managed to locate her surviving relatives and she has remained in contact ever since.

[Geek again – or just skip ahead to [End Geek]: But I mentioned earlier that the new job with the Davis Group was a total bust. I started looking for another job almost as soon as I arrived. Combing the want ads one Sunday afternoon I happened to see an ad that said, "Want a chance to automate Superfund? We've got the job for you." This was more than three years after I had determined that was exactly what I wanted to do. And nothing in the intervening years had changed my mind. I wrote a letter telling them how much I wanted the job and I outlined my qualifications. That got me an interview that resulted in a job offer before the interview was even finished.

My job was to build a distributed networked version of a mainframe system, CERCLIS. CERCLIS tracked all of Superfund's abandoned hazardous waste site. My system was to be one of the very earliest nationwide U.S. government systems built on a pre-internet network called a LAN. I called the system WasteLAN.

A search for WasteLAN today still pulls up a number of links to the application. Here's one from an official EPA.gov site: "CERCLIS is a database used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to track activities conducted under its Superfund program. Specific information is tracked for each individual site. WasteLAN is the name of the regional version of this database."

Within two years of being hired, we had WasteLAN running in all ten of EPA's regional offices. Looks like it is still running today – though certainly a much modified version. By the time I left that work, I felt I had succeeded in my dream. Superfund was being managed from desktop PCs. The program was fully automated.

[End Geek]

8. Starting the Firm

The Superfund job delivered my dream goal of automating the hazardous waste program. More importantly, it provided me with some providential relationships. I mentioned that my first glimpse of my wife, Nancy, left an unforgettable impression. The same thing happened the first time I met Dave Newton, the Superfund lead from the Booz Allen Hamilton. Dave had the presence of an old world aristocrat, minus the pomposity that the word can conjure up. He delivered his studied dress and manner with a casual light-hearted flair. He was physically imposing but soft spoken with bright eyes and a ready smile. He wore three piece suits and starched white shirts set off with staid stripped ties. He pulled off a goatee long before (and after) they were fashionable. And he smoked a pipe until he realized how bad it was for his health. Then he carried it with him, unlit, often clenched between his teeth.

While these impressions built up over time, they were also the ones that struck me the first time I laid eyes on him. I remember thinking 'a consultant's consultant' the moment he walked into the meeting room. Everything about that first meeting told me that I had come to the right place. And in this case, the right place was very large boardroom overlooking the Potomac River. Another eminent consultant, Amy Marasco, held the chair. And there were two dozen other people from half a dozen firms scattered about the room.

Over the course of the next two years Dave and I became fast friends and I relished his mentorship. I always appreciated that he took my brash behavior with good humor. He knew how to use patience and logic to calm me down. Still, despite his constant tutoring, my brash behavior marked me for a first class jerk.

By 1989, Superfund was in its ninth year of operation. It was a major business opportunity for environmentally-oriented consulting firms across the country. Billions were being spent each year on cleanup. And it seemed that the more sites they cleaned, the more new sites they found. Many major consulting firms' – Dave and Amy's among them – supported policy in Washington. They then benefited from those policies when they worked on cleanup in the field.

That year EPA issued a dictum: support policy making in DC or win cleanup contracts in the field. From then on, consulting firms could no longer do both. Dave and Amy realized their firms would leave the small stakes in Washington for the big stakes in the field. This, they understood, would force their own consulting practices to shut down. They were going to lose their jobs.

Dave, ever the consultant, saw his chance to make a move. He approached me one day in early '89 and told me he planned to break away from Booz Allen and start his own company. He surprised – and flattered – me by offering me a partner role. Then he told me he had also recruited Amy. He didn't ask me to commit, he just invited me to a Saturday meeting to talk it through. When I arrived, I found that both he and Amy had their principle lieutenants' in tow, Tom and Jim respectively. They were people I respected but didn't particularly like. They shared that sentiment towards me as well.

We continued to meet most Saturdays as Dave got us to think through what it would take to build a business. He got us to create a Mission Statement that defined both the breadth and the boundaries of our work. We said, for example, that we didn't want Defense-related work. That position moderated somewhat over time. He had us define an organizational chart for a sixty person firm. He had us draw up job descriptions, position qualifications, and salary structures.

Amy had a well-deserved reputations as one of the best marketers in the business. She set about developing our government contract 'capture' strategy. It consisted of talking other firms into subcontracting their work to us while we grew. Her goal was to make us strong enough to unseat Booz Allen's position in Superfund. They had maintained a strangle hold on the program since its inception. Her plan was to unseat one of the world's top consulting firms. And she planned to do by winning one of their most highly prized contracts. The plan struck me as outlandish. I thought it over-confident enough to qualify as crazy.

On the home front, Nancy – ever the planner – crafted her next career move. It had nothing to do with my starting a business in DC. She scouted opportunities for moving overseas. She opposed my even discussing starting a company. It was in clear conflict with my agreement to split careers and join her overseas.

Then Dave and Amy, both married to others at the time, began sleeping together. It seemed like a very bad way to start a company. Dave then announced that we needed money to get started. Each of us had to ante up twenty-five thousand dollars as the cost of admission. I didn't have that kind of money. Between Nancy's opposition, Dave and Amy's affair and the need to find a bunch of money, I was ready to throw in the towel.

I scheduled a heart-to-heart with Dave. I told him I had neither Nancy's support nor twenty-five thousand dollars. I also said I feared that when Dave and Amy's relationship went south only one of the two would remain with the firm. The real strength of the new company was the two of them.

What I didn't say was that I had a personal plan I labelled 'TFI'. Total Financial Independence. TFI was my path to attaining my cherished 'writer's life'. As I mentioned, 'TFI' entailed making enough money to not have to worry about money anymore. I had made a decent start on that goal by growing my systems development team from just me to almost fifty folks. And that had allowed me to negotiate with my current employer for a cut on any business I brought in. So I had a shot at TFI without the risk of striking out on my own.

Dave told me during our discussion that he had filed for divorce and settled accounts with his wife. He said he'd left her the bulk of the assets but that he was walking away with a hundred grand. "That's how much I am bringing to the firm – every cent I have. I've decided there is no one I'd rather bet on than myself. You might want to give that some thought. You might find you feel the same," he said.

I thought about it for a moment and then said, "I couldn't agree more. There is no one I'd rather bet on than...you." When I got home, I told Nancy I couldn't follow her overseas. Then I took out a second mortgage, wrote a check for twenty-five thousand, and joined the firm.

I have shut out the details of how Nancy and I worked it out. I know she had to turn down a dream job in Africa. I know too that she found a way to forgive me. She went along with my starting the business, with a condition. "Only for the next five years," she said. "I swear if you don't come with me on my next overseas assignment, I'll divorce you." I promised her I would. I told her I had also let my new partners know the plan.

Dave and Amy both wanted their names associated with the firm. I knew that banks took working for a company with your name on it as a marker for being self-employed. And that was the last thing I wanted any mortgage lender to think. We ended up calling ourselves MNG for the Marasco Newton Group. Dave joked that the 'G' in MNG was a placeholder for when I had a change of heart. Though we all had equal Board votes, we made Amy the President. Dave was Senior Vice President. Jim, Tom and I were Vice Presidents.

We ran into trouble from the very beginning. We leased office space and computer equipment sufficient for twenty-five or thirty people. We only had a third that many, tops. One evening the security company called me to let me know that the afterhours alarm was going off. They told me I needed to get back into town to shut it off. When I arrived after midnight, I found the office door was jimmied. Thieves had stolen all our newly-leased computers. When the police arrived, they said there was very little chance that we'd ever get them back. That was when it dawned on us that we'd overlooked getting any type of insurance to cover the firm. We now owed forty-thousand dollars to the leasing agency for the stolen computers. And, after only two months of operation, it looked like bankruptcy might be our only out.

The police dropped by the following day to let us know that we were living under a lucky star. "Some good Samaritan in DC saw a couple of guys hawking personal computers off a little trolley in the street. He called them out and they fled the scene. Lucky for you, they left the computers." We ended up getting all but three of the computers back and we didn't have to close the company down.

Six months into operation, June, 1990, the first MNG baby was born. My amazing daughter Kate. We had about thirty employees by then. Many of our old customers had followed us to the new company and work was flowing in. By outward signs, we were already a success. But my partners and I were at each other's throats. And we didn't seem to have the skills needed to resolve the differences that constantly arose.

Some of the issues were trivial, like whether Amy should get her own secretary while the rest of us shared one. Some were difficult, like how many shares of stock each of us was entitled to. No matter the importance of the issue, the discussions led to squabbling. And the squabbling led to each of us trying to tear the others down.

In fairness, both Dave and Amy remained above the fray. They were also growing weary of being the only adults in the room. What was clear was that there was some sort of functional imbalance in our group. Well, 'dysfunctional' is probably the better word. We agreed that something had to change, but we couldn't identify exactly what.

The problems grew worse and worse over a period of about two years. Then, at some point Amy came into my office and asked if we could have a chat. She said that she had been thinking about our difficulties and it had become clear to her that I was at their root. She fingered my behavior during our weekly board meetings. She said I was unprofessional because as she put it, "You argue until you wear everyone down. You force your point and you won't let up until you've worn us out."

Now recall that Amy brought her favorite – Jim – from her old shop, just as Dave had brought his top producer, Tom, from his. As far as I was concerned, both were bigger problems than I was. And they were building their businesses – testing, training and the like – on top of my systems work. Assuming this was only Amy's position, I suggested that we discuss this as a group. That's when she told me that wouldn't be necessary. She said they had all already discussed it and, "They asked me to have this talk." It struck me that Dave and Amy had made a deal to each protect their own. I was the odd man out.

I was floored – and I was scared. Two years in it looked like I was about to be forced out. I admit, I was well aware of the behavior she was talking about. I just didn't think it was all that big a deal. But apparently it was because it sure felt like I was about to get the boot. I decided to own up to it and let the chips fall where they may. I scheduled time with each of them and promised that I would do my best to change my behavior. Then I sat back and waited for my pink slip. But my dismissal notice never came. Instead, the 'problem' spot light shifted to Tom and within a couple of months we'd forced him out.

During this same period, Nancy and I went to Guatemala. The trip was partly intended as a break from the tension at work. It was also partly a get time away from the challenges of balancing having a new-born baby in the house. The trip didn't start well. We arrived in Miami to reports of a tornado at the airport. That caused our flight to divert to the Bahamas. By the time we returned to Miami, we'd missed our connection to Guatemala.

The airline offered to put us up at their expense, offering a room at a nearby hotel. Unfortunately, the room overlooked an eight lane highway. It had a sliding glass door that wouldn't close and smelled of stale urine. I called the front desk to ask if we could pay for an upgrade. No, they told me, airline provided rooms were not eligible for upgrade, regardless of who paid.

Rather than accept this dictum, I hoofed it across the block to the main hotel. At the front desk I mentioned (in a bald faced lie of blatant self-interest) that I was on my honeymoon. Could I not pay this once for an upgrade? The clerk went off and soon came back with another key. "Don't worry about paying for the upgrade," she told me, "we comp'ed you the room."

When Nancy and I got to the new room, we found they had given us the gorgeous Presidential Suite. It came with floor to ceiling windows that looked out across the Miami skyline. On the opposite side, the view was of the southern Atlantic. There was a hot tub so big that it took 30 minutes to fill. And they had placed complimentary champagne in the spacious living room. I felt like a cad. And we were thrilled.

We arrived in Guatemala and made the more or less mandatory stop at Lake Atitlan. We were both runners in those days. (Nancy still is, but I am more of an ass-sitter now). Nancy asked around for anyone who might be on hand to act as a paid running guide. The immediate response was 'Caballo Blanco'. It was a name we remembered forever because of the memorable run we had.

Caballo Blanco – meaning White Horse in Spanish – was a tall thin American about my age. He had white-blond hair to the middle of his back and a very laid-back demeanor. We told him we were looking for a good six to ten mile run around the lake and he said, no problem, he knew the perfect one. The lovely run ended at a small lakeside town. This was during a bad period in Guatemala and in Atitlan in particular. Only the year before, government soldiers had wiped out an entire village right next to the one we were in.

As we shared a beer in the village, Caballo told us that he ran the lake route every day. It was clear from the cheers that went up to greet him at every town he passed that he was something of a local treasure. Before he left us to complete his run he invited us to stop over at his place that evening. As he departed, I asked how much of the run he still had to go. "It's about fifty miles total," he said with a grin, "so I'd say I have a little more that forty left to go."

A few years ago, I read that a world-renown ultramarathon runner was found dead in a canyon in New Mexico. The article said that the runner – the fabled Micah True – was better known as Caballo Blanco. It went on to say that he died while living among a Native American tribe, the Tarahumara, who are revered for their almost super-human running feats.

When I mentioned the article to Nancy, she said it couldn't possibly be the same guy. In fact, she said, she was pretty sure she'd seen Caballo on a trip back to Guatemala earlier that year. But when I googled it, his picture came up – running on Lake Atitlan, no less! Turns out there is an outstanding book about him called Born to Run. It is one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read...and not because it is about him. It is a seriously a terrific read.

As I write this I googled Micah and Atitlan again. Here is what I got (and I swear I had already written what you've just read before I ever looked this up): "Micah True was given his nick-name meaning White Horse by the Mayans who inhabited the highlands of Guatemala during the time of their civil war. While spending a few winters circling the volcanic crater lake of Atitlan, True would run into a village, greet the Indigenous people, buy some tortillas and bananas, then move on from village to village. Eventually as he entered the outskirts of each village, the women and children would line the streets calling out "El Caballo Blanco," and the kids would follow him, laughing. He thought this sweet so he carried this name throughout his travels in Latin America.

In his article Meeting the Tarahumara at the Leadville 100 (www.caballoblanco.com) he writes "The image of a Caballo Blanco must be rather endearing to Latin and Indigenous people, because I have always been greeted warmly, bringing a smile when I introduce myself." [Sue Berliner, http://www.sweatmagazine.com/index.php/news/517-micah-true-known-as-caballo-blanco]

Here is a link to a more complete bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micah_True, and be sure to read that book!

9. Equally Disappointed

During this same period, my business took a turn for the worse. Before starting the company we partners devised our 'recruitment strategy'. We wanted to lure some of our key people away from our former employers. But we wanted to do it in a way that would annoy our firms as little as possible. Towards that end, each of us approached our key recruits. We explained our business goals, staffing plan, and benefits.

As a new company we didn't have the resources to compete with our former firms' non-financial benefits. So we got creative. In 1990, we were one of the earliest firms to implement a 'casual Friday' policy. We added a 'half-day' policy for Fridays...get your 40 hours in by noon and you were free to go. We did a lot of things to make the firm vibrant and attractive.

I recruited numerous people from Network Management Inc. (NMI) where I was working at the time, and I staggered their arrival to limit the negative impact. I also asked some of those who agreed to come on-board not to mention where they were heading for a while. George Mohrmann was a key lieutenant of mine at NMI and he eagerly accepted a job with me at MNG.

Of course, not all our recruits were from our former companies. Two in that category immediately come to mind. The first was my good old friend Ralph Parkinson from Peace Corps Togo. I called his mother to find out where he was so I could tell him about the birth of my daughter, Kate. Mrs. Parkinson told me that he had been chasing some young Spanish woman around Europe. But at the moment he was working as a handyman at a nudist colony in France. She said she wished she could get him to come home.

I spoke to my business partners about Ralph, saying he was hard working and had a technical bent. I thought I could get him to come in a help run our network infrastructure. And I was pretty sure I could get him for minimum wage. They agreed to my hiring him after I promised I would cut it off in three months, after I found 'real' network people.

When I finally tracked him down, he rejected my offer out of hand. The next day, he had second thoughts. He called back and said to count him in. After three months, I told him his time was up. He told me to go talk to my partners. They had all asked him to stick around. Ralph soon became a serious network engineer. In fact, he built a practice around selling his network skills to many other companies. In the end, he stayed with MNG many years after I had already left.

The other person I found early on was another very talented guy named Ryan Magrab. Ryan, George and I started building software that attracted a lot of good business. Within the first 18 months of starting out, we had a team of more than twenty systems people onboard. And the company was approaching one hundred full-time staff.

George and Ryan worked well together from the start. So well in fact that my wife, Nancy, once had a dream that I told them about. She said she'd dreamt that George and Ryan had broken away from MNG to start their own business. Mohrmann and Magrab were unabashedly materialistic. We all thought it funny that in Nancy's dream they'd named their firm 'GrabMor'.

George could be difficult. But I always found that this was a small price to pay for his intelligence, loyalty and hard work. My partner Amy, however, never felt that way and her feeling towards him eventually drove him out. He landed on his feet, getting a great job with major stock options at the Oracle Corporation. I told him I'd always be there for him and wished him all the best. Two weeks later he'd recruited Ryan Magrab. Then the two put a plan in place to steal all my best people.

They pulled person after person over to Oracle. It was easy picking as Oracle was a first class company offering serious stock options. And their stock was flying off the charts. Mohrmann and Magrab were out to kill my business. I was doing everything I could to keep my head above water but my clients were getting nervous. Then my project deadlines began to slip. I took up a mantra that summed up my world. "My life is in balance when my family, my clients and my business partners are all equally disappointed in me."

George was angry. He waged all-out war cherry picking my people. In the end I told him to forget I'd ever considered him a friend; he was dead to me. Then I threaten Oracle with a law suit if they took another person. At that point they agreed to cease and desist.

Five years later, George and Ryan actually did start their own firm. Here's what I found about it on the Web:

"GrabMor Technologies LLC was founded in 1998 by two former Oracle Corporation employees, George Mohrmann and Ryan Magrab... Having worked not only at Oracle, but at several other companies specializing in Oracle consulting, we have developed a strong team of some of the best and brightest Oracle talent in the area." Yeah boy – mine.

The last I heard of George was this sad article from July 2005 in the Washington Post:

"George Robert Mohrmann – Computer Programmer: George Robert Mohrmann, 44, a McLean business owner and computer programmer analyst, died July 24 of a head trauma after a boating accident on the Potomac River near Fredericksburg. He was a McLean resident. Mr. Mohrmann dived off a boat in shallow water near Fairview Beach and did not resurface, an official with the King George County sheriff's office said. When friends pulled him out of the water, he was unconscious. He was declared dead at the scene. Mr. Mohrmann ran his own company, GrabMor Technologies. He previously had worked for a number of technology companies." He was out swimming with Ryan when he died.

The loss of my top talent put me into and even more frantic hiring mode than our typical breakneck pace. The typical pace was set by Dave. Here is an example of how he set it: I announced that I had landed a small new piece of work – two people for six months. He shook his head and corrected me. "No, that's four people for three months' worth of work. Better get busy hiring."

One guy I brought on was a software project manager by the name of Gary Giordano who had just left Booz Allen. I consider myself a keen judge of technical competence and Gary seemed ok at first. But I started noticing that something was weird about the guy. One time I joined him for a marketing call. To my surprise, he was driving a pretty decent Mercedes. I knew how much he was making so the car seemed a little over the top. He pulled into a filling station and the cashier came out to tell him his credit card had been rejected. He asked me to hand him a box under my seat and when he opened it, I saw it was stuffed with credit cards. When I asked him about them he smiled and said, "If you keep enough of those in play you'll never get caught."

A short time later he gave me his time sheet to sign and I noticed that he hadn't taken leave on a day he told me he was off. When I confronted him about it, he winked at me and said, "Come on. We both know how the game is played. You just bill the government for the time. What do they know? We keep this between us." He was a large guy and somewhat intimidating, despite wearing a ludicrous toupee. It seemed he often tried to force me into compromising positions, ethical dilemmas. I knew I was the boss and that I had the upper hand but, even so, he made me kind of scared. It wasn't a role I knew and it made me very uncomfortable.

This behavior continued for a few months. And I began to puzzle out how I could get rid of him before things got any worse. As the holidays approached, we scheduled our annual Christmas party – and as usual it was set up to be a gala affair. We'd rented a large fancy hotel ballroom at a plush downtown hotel and many people had also rented rooms. Nancy and I were comp'ed an amazing Presidential suite by my brother Bill. He was the head of the Sales and Marketing team there, so he had gotten the company a good deal. We partied pretty hard before the event had even gotten started. Then I partied a bit more than I should have as the evening got under way. At one point during the evening, as I was speaking to two young women from the firm, Gary approached me. He threw his arm around my shoulder and rubbed his knuckles into my hair. Then he looked at the two women and said, "You're talking to my bitch."

I stopped his clowning and asked if I could have a private word. We walked into the hall and I said, "You're fired. Get out of here right now." Now I admit I had a well-earned reputation for letting people go. But always before and since that involved a process I called 'out-counseling'. I'd let the person know that there seemed to be a misfit between what they were providing and what we were looking for. Then I always gave people time to try to work it out. I often also suggested they start looking for another job while they still had their current one. I have had that conversation at least forty times and it has always worked out well for all concerned. I felt bad about firing him on the spot – and ashamed it had been while I had been drinking – and particularly at the Christmas party.

My colleagues were of course duly shocked. But to a person they all agreed he had it coming. Just that it never should have happened at the Christmas party. The story followed me for decades and wove itself into the Marasco Newton lore. In fact, ten years into our corporate history, the company unveiled a long banner at a corporate event. The banner listed our major contract wins along with other key corporate accomplishments. There, under December 1994, someone had added, 'Mike fires Gary at the Christmas Party'.

Gary resurfaced one more time later in my life. In 2011, I was returning from a trip to Alaska when I saw an article like this one: http://people.com/crime/aruba-mystery-what-happened-to-missing-robyn-gardner/

Aruba Mystery: What Happened to Missing Robyn Gardner?

"Robyn Gardner was supposed to be in Orlando with her parents. At least that's what she told her boyfriend, Richard Forester...In fact, the 35-year-old beautiful, blond Maryland woman with a radiant smile had traveled to the Caribbean with a man named Gary Giordano, a 50-year-old businessman also from Maryland with a disturbing past. Now, Gardner is missing and presumed dead, Giordano is being detained, and questions are mounting about what happened during their island stay.

The mystery has only deepened as authorities in Aruba begin releasing details from the investigation. The most recent shocker was the discovery of graphic photographs on Giordano's digital camera. The images, a source tells PEOPLE are "beyond pornographic"...The leads have been provocative. Along with the photos, authorities revealed they're looking into a $1.5 million accidental death insurance policy that Giordano reportedly took out on Gardner before their trip.

To this day, more than five years after Roybn's disappearance, Gary remains a free – if followed – man. He was denied a payout for the insurance claim due to suspicions that he is responsible for her disappearance, and the U.S. police have arrested him several times on various unrelated charges."

News of these developments quickly reached my old friends at MNG. Many said to me that it proved my instincts were right. I replied each time, "Maybe, but it still doesn't justify firing him at the Christmas party."

At the point at which I fired Gary, the company was completing its fifth year of operation. We had grown by leaps and bounds and now had a team of about two hundred professionals. We were beginning to make serious money. And we were rewarding ourselves, as partners, with significant pay. I'm not talking Wall Street money here, but we were making about twice the salaries of our other senior staff. At least we were when times were good...and many times were good.

But this period included bad times as well. George and Ryan's mischief hurt my business and I was working double time to keep my work afloat. I had to scurry to restore order and rebuild staff. Also, the Republican Tea Party was taking joy in shutting down the federal government. Those shut downs included us, the federal contractors. While the Feds eventually paid themselves for their time off, they never paid their contractors. The lack of a dependable cash flow lead us to lay off staff twice that year. Fortunately, they were only lay-offs we ever had to do.

Also, our overt success attracted the ire of our competitors. One of them called the Inspector General at the Environmental Protection Agency with an anonymous tip. They falsely reported that we were encouraging timesheet fraud. The police came swarming in. They flashed federal badges and ordered everybody into 'lock down'. They made everyone to swear not to divulge the nature of the interrogations they were about to endure. Then they took each staff member, one by one, to drag confessions out of them.

There was no substance to the allegations, so there was nothing to divulge. But the heavy-handed tactics made some employees wonder if something bad was actually going on. My partner, Dave, who lived his principles, was particularly incensed by the way the Inspectors treated the staff. They finally broke camp, acknowledging that their onslaught had uncovered not a single shred of wrong-doing. Dave insisted that they apologize and tell the staff that they had received a bogus tip. Adding the final insult to injury, they refused his request. They said, "Just because we didn't find anything doesn't mean you didn't do anything wrong."

A long series of difficulties like these punctuated this period for me. So when Nancy said she was pulling the 'time to move overseas' card, I met it with a sense of relief. She let me know we were moving to the distant island of Madagascar.

Having recently been through the process of removing our partner Tom, I knew I needed to think long and hard about how I wanted to structure my own departure. I also realized how little I actually understood about our partnership agreement. I needed a better understanding of how stocks work in a privately held company. So I did what anyone would do in a similar situation: I lawyered-up.

What I learned was I didn't have a leg to stand on if I left. I held one of four voting seats on the Board and I owned eighteen percent of the outstanding shares. Still, once I left, the remaining board members were free to revalue the company. They could, for example, decide to quadruple the number of common shares. Then they were free to award all the new shares to themselves. Doing that would dilute mine to a fraction of their value. And there were lots of other moves they could easily make to effectively deal me out. It appeared that I could add my departure to the growing list of problems I needed to confront. But this one loomed larger because it threatened the main thing I had set out to achieve: TFI. Total Financial Independence was slipping from my grasp. And so was my dream of being well off enough to get back to my writing.

In the end, I sucked it up and let everyone know I was keeping my commitment to Nancy. I told them I planned to leave the firm. I said I would resign my Board position but I planned to keep my stock. And I never let anyone know what I had learned about how vulnerable I was. I figured if they wanted to go that way they could figure it out on their own.

What I did do was to give them 33% of my stock back. I suggested that they use the shares I retruned to attract a suitable replacement. I stipulated only that, if they accepted my offer, they be bound by the same terms. They each agreed to provide equal value back in the event that they ever chose to leave the firm. I ended by saying I hoped they would take me back in two years when I returned from Madagascar.

Then I went off to the State Department to complete my pre-departure physical. The exam was little shy of a physical assault. The doctor bombarded me with a stream of questions about my lifestyle. At one point he asked how much I drank. I replied honestly, "five beers a night." He stopped the exam and said, "Did I hear you correctly? Five beers...a night?" Yes, I confirmed, he had heard me right. "Then I seriously doubt you'll be headed to Madagascar," he said as he filled out an order for mandatory alcohol counseling. I was to report to the substance abuse counselor the following day.

My counseling lasted the better part of an hour. I said that I had always believed in being truthful to doctors so as not to impinge upon their ability to deliver care. I said that I had been drinking at the same level – without variation – every day for the past thirty years. I explained that I was a productive member of society and ran my own medium sized business. I said that with very limited exceptions, I had never missed a day of work. In the end, the counselor let reasonableness prevail. He signed off on my fitness for duty at a hardship post. We were headed to the Great Red Island.

10. Madagascar

The thought of heading to Madagascar excited me. I planned to rekindle my writing habits and skills. And I began to see my time on the great red island as a second 'writing sabbatical'.

I read every book I could lay my hands on about the exotic locale. And I dug into pirate lore with particular zeal. Madagascar had its piratical heydays in the late sixteen and early seventeen hundreds. The little half-moon of an island named Ilse St Marie was a pirate legend. The one thousand pirates who lived there proclaimed it an independent pirate nation. It is still home of the world's only 'pirate cemetery'.

I scoured the libraries for all the relevant literature. I even commissioned a book trader to locate a copy of, 'Madagascar or Robert Drury's Journal' last printed in 1890. Here's the first paragraph from the books' Wikipedia page:

'Robert Drury (born 1687; died between 1743 and 1750) was an English sailor on the Degrave who was shipwrecked at the age of 17 on the island of Madagascar. He would be trapped there for fifteen years. Upon returning to England, a book allegedly recounting his memoirs would be published in his name in 1729. Though it was an instant success, the credibility of the details in the book would be put into question by later historians. Modern scholars have proven though that many details in the book are authentic and that the story itself is one of the oldest written historical accounts of life in southern Madagascar during the 18th century.' The book is thought by some to a fictional work by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, because it tells a very similar tale, is written in the same style and published by the same publisher in the same general time frame.'

I reminded myself of my mantra. "If you don't write particularly well, you'd better have something interesting to write about." To me, pirates came about as close as I expected to get to fitting that particular bill. So I searched for a viable plot which would leverage the exotic locale.

Eighteen months after arriving I had a solid first draft of a manuscript I called 'The Left Hand of God'. But mentioning what appeared after eighteen months of writing is getting a bit ahead of myself. I just wanted to set the stage. Let me start again by covering the early days...

The last leg of our trip took us from the East coast of Africa across three hundred miles of Indian Ocean. The sky below the plane consisted of a patchwork of puffy clouds spaced as evenly as pieces on a chess board. The light caught the rain falling beneath many of them and reflected it as a field of miniature rainbows.

We landed in the capital, Antannanrivo. The city is twenty degrees south of the equator and five thousand feet in the air. The bright red soil of the island was set against emerald green fields of rice. Dan Vagness, the Peace Corps volunteer with whom I'd lived in Afghanistan, had grown up on the island. He had fixed its image in my mind, saying, "The plants and animals found there exist nowhere else in the world. It looks like a world created by Dr. Seuss."

Nancy, as usual, hit the ground running. I'd get a peek on the cheek and a 'goodbye' at first light and not see her again until after dark. She left no doubt that she expected me to handle the task of setting up our lives. While she may not have said it out loud, her message was clear. "I put my life on hold for the last six years – now it is your turn." I thought I was ready for it, but that is not how it turned out.

It turns out I made a terrific mess of things. We got off to a disastrous start and it didn't improve much from there. To begin with, I hadn't appreciated how small and tight the 'official' American community would be. As the newest members of that clubby group, we were initially the object of interest. We garnered the pro forma dinner invitations and such. I was typically asked what I planned to do to fill my time as the 'trailing spouse'. But I was too insecure about my writing to declare my plan out loud. Instead, I disingenuously said that I had been working hard for the past few years. I was looking forward to some down time. I may as well have made the 'I'm a loser' sign by plastering my thumb and pointer finger against my forehead.

Several well-intentioned people said that the Embassy could help me. They had 'family member' opportunities. But I remained resistant to their entreaties...and soon the word went out. "The guy's a loser," the grapevine said. And my self-induced social ostracism only served to fuel my growing self-doubts.

Nancy meanwhile seemed hell-bent on reliving her Peace Corps dream. And she had been one wild volunteer. I have always had serious difficulty keeping my jealous tendencies in check. But her 'I'm leaving home' attitude, mixed the romantic characters with whom she was now engaged, proved a toxic combination. Add to that mix my prescription for a known paranoia inducing anti-malaria drug. The upshot was I was getting crazier by the day. My mood swings jumped from deep depression to near maniacal rage. And it got consistently worse over eighteen months.

Early on we had an incident that foreshadowed events to come. During the first week we were in town, the Regional Security Officer dropped by to inspect our house. The house, Villa Ophelia, is to this day perhaps the nicest we have ever lived in. It was in the upscale community of Ivandry. We knew from others that we were incredibly lucky to get a house there. Many of the more elite Foreign Service officers at the Embassy had to wait their turn in line. "But, I know why you got this house," the Regional Security Officer told me in hushed tones. "Why don't you get the kids off to school before we talk? I do not want them to overhear."

Once I'd gotten the kids squared away, the RSO said, "So no one mentioned that the previous tenant was murdered in this house?" No, I told him, no one had bothered to mention that. "And how do you feel about that?" he wanted to know. I swallowed my concern and gave him a stoic shrug. "It doesn't seem like a big deal."

Then I asked him what he knew about the murder. "It happened very recently and made quite a stir. It was a rich Asian guy, is what I heard. People say he wasn't nice to the people who worked for him at the house. They say the night guard had enough of him. He beat him to death and dumped his body in the yard. Hard to protect yourself from your own protection."

My business partner Amy had a crazy idea before I left. She suggested that I make a reappearance at the office after I'd been away a few weeks. Her thinking was that I'd be able to convince our clients that I was both still reachable and engaged. I'd initially protested but eventually agreed. A couple of weeks after I arrived in Madagascar, I started packing for a trip back home. I took a phone call just before walking out the door, headed for the airport. It was Nancy, who was Acting Peace Corps Director at the time.

"I got some terrible news," she said in a subdued tone. "One of the Peace Corps volunteer is dead. I know you are leaving soon, but I expect I'll be in the office for long hours over the next few days. I was hoping you'd find someone who could help look after the kids before you go."

While I didn't know the people I'd hired to help around the house all that well, they seemed like a terrific group. I spoke with them and they agreed to do whatever they could to help us out. Then I took off for the airport to start my journey home.

A quick aside. Early in our marriage, my assistant broke into a meeting to whisper that the hospital had called. They said they had Nancy in the emergency room. She was suffering from life threatening anaphylactic shock. The hospital had managed to stabilize her but they asked that I make my way down as soon as I could.

I heard two things: life-threatening and stabilized. I took a deep breath and continued with my meeting. Three hours later my assistant asked how my wife was doing. It was only then that I remembered I had forgotten to follow up. I left for the hospital immediately and arrived four hours after I had been notified. It was a four hour gap that neither Nancy nor I will forgive or forget.

I remembered the emergency room debacle as soon as I got to the airport. I quickly reconsidered and returned home to look after the kids. Later that day, Nancy called to tell me that the volunteer was found outside her village on the side of a dirt road. She had been raped and murdered. Her horrible and tragic end was only the beginning of what was to be a continuing ordeal.

I kept extensive notes at the time of Nancy Coutu's murder. I have just finished reviewing them. It has been over twenty years since these events occurred. I have been struggling to come up with an appropriate context within which to describe them. At the human and emotional level, it is almost impossible to describe the impact of an event like this.

Many of the volunteers, living alone – often in extremely foreign and remote circumstances – could see themselves in such tragic circumstances. They felt they'd lost their sense of personal security. Until then they had felt integral to their communities. Now many felt like outsiders – or worse – potential victims. In an abundance of caution, the volunteers got orders to return to the capital. They U.S. Mission needed time to reassess the security environment and to think about next steps.

Nancy (my Nancy, Nancy G – the victim's name was also Nancy, Nancy C) got a steady streaming of worsening news. Nancy C had been accosted the previous evening in her tiny village of Bereketa. It was the Monday after Easter and the biggest holiday celebration of the year. Bereketa borders the Isalo National Park. Isalo is Madagascar's answer to the Grand Canyon or the Painted Desert. My notes from a visit there describe the place like this: "Bereketa, Nancy's village, is home to 300 hundred people. It lies 13.5 kilometers down a dirt tracking leading from the national highway. I couldn't find the path leading to the town until some nearby kids ran up the road to show me.

I traveled six miles on good dirt/sand road with grass growing high between single tire tracks. Then saw a black cloud of locust up ahead. A truck, the first sign of humanity since the highway, stopped under the swarm. A kilometer further, a boy, naked except for cutoff jeans, raced down the dirt track. I stopped. Was I going to Ranohiro, he asked? Wrong direction, but yes, I'll be going back. He climbed in. He was looking for his T-shirt which had blown out of the truck that I'd seen pass.

The road got worse. Steep downhill, then sand. I needed to engage the 4 wheel drive. I gunned it through a stream and barely made it. Beyond, a small new fence enclosed a four foot mound of rocks all painted white. 'You know what happened?' the boy asked, referring to Nancy Coutu. Yes, I knew. "This marks the spot." It was dark for her then, only 5 am. Her bike would have gotten bogged down in the sand. The village was out of ear shot – but only just.

When we got into town, I found her house beside the new dispensary. The town's setting was beautiful beyond words. My general impression – safest place on earth. A phrase came to me: The other side of anywhere. Echoed the idea of being very far away as well as being very common. Like 'it could as easily happen here; the bad that is in all good places'.

The ceiling in her house is hardly higher than my head. The walls covered in yellow paint. Three rooms, no windows, just a couple doors. Someone is living there, though I thought the president of the commune told me they had knocked it down. She had gestured to the ceiling beams in her own thatched hut and made a sawing motion as she explained. It later turned out she was telling me was that her husband was out chopping wood.

I drew a crowd as I looked at the new dispensary. They said there was a doctor. No, she was actually a midwife. The place had beds and desks but no medicine. Still, more than most clinics I have seen. I carried applications for the Ambassador's Self-Help program. I gave one to the only French speaker in the town. I don't think he really understood.

On my way back out, which I would never have found alone, we saw the vast cloud of locust again. The kid told me his brother was local police in town. He was out chasing the Dahalo, the local name for cattle rustlers. Real-life Malagasy version of Mexican banditos. Sombila, the man arrested for Nancy's murder, was the leader of one group. He often walked his stolen cattle through village on his way to Ihosy market. He made the long, dry, difficult walk with only a blanket, a jug of water and a stick with an ice pick point. He used the stick to murder Nancy, driving it through her skull, because she'd shunned his advances at a party. He was now jailed on the prison island of Nosy Lava. The other the members of his gang are all dispersed or dead.

'Robert Drury's Journal' describes the ancient tradition of cattle rustling. The difference between now and then is that back then it was village against village. Now it is outlaw gangs against villages. It is common knowledge that the police, the gendarmes, are all corrupt. It is said that they rent their AK-47s out to gang members by the day. The Dahalo steal cattle in broad daylight. With the police paid off, there is nothing the villagers can do.

On our way back out to the highway, the kid found his T-shirt. One in a million chance. Told me it was the only shirt he owned. I drove him all the way back into town and gave him money for a second shirt.

This is what happened in quick succession after they found Nancy's body:

• Peace Corps and the Embassy responded deftly. They chartered a plane and sent professionals to investigate.

• The Ambassador called all volunteers into the capital. She ordered a security assessment of all volunteers' villages and towns

• The national police got a lead on the bandit, Sombila. They determined that he and two of his gang were responsible for Nancy's death.

• They captured Sombila and brought him into the capital to stand trail.

• The US government tirelessly pushed for the death sentence. Madagascar had one on the books but they had never executed anyone before.

• While awaiting sentencing, they sent Sombila to the prison island of Nosy Lava. Nosy Lava was a notoriously dangerous place. It was commonly believed that escape from there was impossible. That was before he made his escape.

Unfortunately, Sombila's story isn't over yet...I'll return to it in a bit.

11. (A)Sordid Adventures

So let me summarize where we are with Madagascar at this point. I am writing my heart out every day, while tearing my heart out with delusions about Nancy. And the anti-malarias are working a number on my head. The kids are tiny, four and six, and they are still a mystery to me. I never saw much of them in the States because of my ridiculous work schedule. And now I have house help who provide for their fulltime care.

We picked up a beautiful stone cottage on a pristine mountain lake where we spend idyllic weekends. But I am jealous and suspicious of everyone. I am driving myself (and Nancy) nuts – really seriously, literally. I am sinking into a weird self-reinforcing mental death spiral. Part of it is self-loathing for losing my sense of self as an entrepreneur/businessman. Part of it is my realization that my literary aspirations are one more proof of my delusions.

On top of this, one day I took a nap on the lawn at the lake house. A couple weeks later I found a pig-shit dwelling insect had crawled into my chin and laid a big face-boil full of eggs. I popped the boil and a load of living things came tumbling out. Somehow living insects springing from my face struck me as an apt metaphor for my life at this point. I still pick my chin with persistence, as if to ensure that no vestige of those dark days remain.

Somewhere around this point I decided that what I needed was to get up every morning and go to work. I looked around and opportunities start popping up. A software firm I knew from DC brought me on as a regional systems implementer under contract with USAID. At the same time, USAID in Madagascar offered me a job. Then the State Department hired me as a 'trailing spouse' to oversee the Ambassador's Self Help fund. That was a small time job but it offered lots of interesting local travel all across the great red isle.

At exactly this same point, Sombila raced back to the forefront of our lives. The court ordered Sombila back to the capital for sentencing. Because of U.S. pressure, he believed he was facing a death sentence. Somehow, he instead managed to escape from the escape-proof island of Nosy Lava.

America was, at the time, posting rewards for the arrest of terrorists abroad. These had resulted in the arrest of suspects in the recent East Africa Embassy bombings. The State Department decided to extend the practice to Sombila.

The Sombila saga generated a continuous stream of newspaper articles. There were daily tales of his many near captures and miraculous escapes. The reward prompted sightings in every corner of the world's largest island. But Sombila managed to stay out of the hands of the bounty-chasing lawmen. The papers linked Nancy, who was in charge of Peace Corps financial operations, with the cash reward – 5 million Malagasy francs. It was the equivalent of four years of normal local pay. On Thursday, January 22nd, 1998, Sombila wrote Nancy a note in blood red ink. It said, 'You are looking for me so I am coming to get you. Prepare to die.' He signed it 'Sombila' followed by a skull and cross bones. The note chilled me to the core.

Nancy, on the other hand, was totally unfazed. "I've got Dude," she confidently informed me. She hooked a thumb toward her very macho 'strong silent-type' driver who had more of the attitude of a bodyguard. That girl is rock hard and bred tough. Ask anyone who knows her. I, however, am not...and I didn't have a bodyguard. I also figured if Sombila couldn't get to Nancy (which he easily could have) he'd come for me...or far worse, for the kids. I mean the guy was a known psychopath. He'd killed a bunch of people. He'd brutally murdered a defenseless young American woman with a couple of his gang. What was going to keep him from taking Nancy out?

Fortunate for us, several months later they re-arrested him. Then they sent him back to jail. Since then I have looked but can find no further reference to him anywhere on-line. That is until recently (2016), when I found a musical recording. It is a song called 'Sombila' from a collection called 'Tulear Never Sleeps'. The recording resembles a Mexican 'Narcocorrido' glamorizing drug criminals in folk music form.

Here are the lyrics:

There's a famous man who came from the North

Sombila was his name

Sombila, a prisoner sent into exile at Nosilava

He went through Morondava and finally arrived in Tulear

He was a "wanted man" by the authorities who would pay money to anyone who could track him

Be careful he's a dangerous man!

The famous Sombila was arrested in Maroantsetra

Given to the authority and sent to Toamasina

Ao!

Take it slow, you Sombila!

Dangerous, you are!

It seems that you are sick

And don't know what to do

Eh, he's sick!

Eh, there's nothing we can do!

Eh, he's suffering!

In the end, Madagascar ended up being a great post. I got off the paranoia-inducing anti-malarial and found fulfilling work. I completed my manuscript of The Left Hand of God and put it on the shelf. Determined to do better than I had with that attempt, I started on yet another book. That one was about Dominican organ harvesters. They took a job that required a victim with a specific wound needed to test a new robotic arm. I called the book 'Cut Loose'.

The off-island job with USAID got me around Africa, and particularly to Namibia down in the south. In the time I was there I managed to get to a little game park twice, and twice had amazing experiences. The first time, I was in the swimming pool after a long day of baiting cheetahs. The bait was game meat strapped to the hood of an open vehicle. The cheetahs would chase the jeep and jump onto the hood. When I got back to the hotel pool, two more cheetahs got into the enclosed pool area and began to meander around. I had heard that cheetahs were not known to attack adult humans. So I was enjoying their proximity until a couple came into the pool area with two small children. The cheetahs immediately sensed a meal and began to stalk the family. They stalked by slowly circling, waiting for an opportunity to grab a kid.

The couple started to freak out and asked aloud what they should do. I said, "If I were you I'd get into the pool until someone gets those animals out of here." It wasn't so much that I didn't think cheetahs could swim – I had no idea about that. But I was fairly certain that these two particular cheetahs couldn't because both of them were missing their hind legs. They had their bellies strapped to makeshift carts that rolled on rubber wheels. I was pretty sure that even the cheetahs had figured out that their trollies wouldn't float.

The second thing that happened to me there also involved an animal attack. Only that time there was an actual victim, and it was me. Where cheetahs are not known for attacking humans, leopards certainly are. They are, in fact, the most ferocious of the all the big cats. So there I was minding my own business, walking through a line of building at this farm. I heard this tremendous bone rattling roar and felt a pair of jaws clamp into my lower leg. I screamed in pain and writhed on the ground trying to pry the leopard off. Never mind that the cub was probably no more than six weeks old...it was still seriously hard to budge.

I enjoyed telling this story and watching the awe or disbelief grow in my audience's eyes. Then seeing it disdain as I delivered the line, "It was a little baby cat." That is I was enjoying it until I mentioned it at a dinner party we were having once I'd returned to Madagascar. I told the story to those assembled, including a guest who was the embassy nurse. "Did you get a rabies shots?" She asked. No, I said, it had never crossed my mind. "Well then I'll see you in my office tomorrow and we can begin the treatment course." That sort of took the fun out of telling that particular tale – at least for a little while.

We had our full share of memorable moments in Madagascar, but I will stick to mentioning these two:

I was working in Uganda on an USAID contract in March of 1999. This was shortly after a rebel band attacked a group of British and American tourists there. The press has details on that massacre which left eight people dead. Many more were deeply traumatized.

The only direct impact on me was that the US Embassy told me I could not leave Kampala in its aftermath. That meant I was facing the prospect of a boring urban weekend if I couldn't find something else to do. Looking for loopholes, I pushed the Regional Security Officer for options. He reiterated that all areas beyond the city were off-limits. Then he added that there was an exemption for the town of Jinja, to the East. I was free to do something there.

Jinja is also known as the 'Source of the Nile'. The White Nile, which starts on Lake Victoria. It traverses the continent – heading 'up' North of all things. It cuts through Egypt and dumps out in the Mediterranean Sea.

I found an outfit in Jinja offering a rafting trip. I signed up and they picked me up in an old yellow school bus. The bus was crammed with wild-eyed young people in high-end outdoor gear. Pairs high-fived one another as they discovered 'extreme' adventures that they shared.

I had a queasy feeling that this raft trip might be 'extreme sport' itself. So I sought out the lead guide and asked if it was too late to back out. "Don't let this crew scare you," he assured me, "we have two trips today. One is for these extreme guys and the other one's the 'bird boat'. You're on the bird boat. They'll point it out to you when you get off the bus."

We arrived at the point of entry and they shuffled us off to boats. I got to my boat and met my guide. He tossed me my safety gear. Then he pulled on my life vest tabs until I was uncomfortably corseted. As he began the safety briefing, I noticed a thick iron spike driven through his tongue. "Ok, remember," he said, "when you get tossed – and you will get tossed – you will come back up. That's what the vests are for and they always work. We've never lost anyone on this river and we've been doing this for years. But it will seem like you're not going to be coming back up. So here's what you need to know: The water will get darker and darker as it sucks you down. When it gets pitch black you'll start back up. Keep your eyes closed but notice how the water gets lighter and lighter and catch a breath as soon as you pop out. Because you'll likely be going straight back down. Got it?"

I didn't know what to say, so instead of saying nothing, I said, "I'm supposed to be in the bird boat." He grinned a knowing, evil grin and shook his head. His spiked tongue darted between his lips and he growled, "My name is Satan...and there ain't no bird boat." Then, noticing my wedding ring, he added "Better let me put that in my zipper pocket. Leave it there and this fucking water will definitely suck it off."

Until that day I'd never heard of Class 5 rapids. I know now that there is an International Scale of River Difficulty that goes all the way to Class 6. Class 1 is defined as 'Easy' and Class 6 'impassable'. When someone eventually survives a Class 6, it becomes a Class 5. Technically survivable. Class 5 is an extension of Class 4. Class 4 is described like this:

Advanced: Intense, powerful but predictable rapids requiring precise boat handling in turbulent water. ...Rapids may require "must make" moves above dangerous hazards. Scouting may be necessary... Risk of injury to swimmers is moderate to high, and water conditions may make self-rescue difficult.

Class 5 (Expert) extends the above by adding: "Extremely long, obstructed, or very violent rapids. They may continue for long distances between pools, demanding a high level of fitness. Swims are dangerous, and rescue is often difficult even for experts. Extensive experience and practiced rescue skills are essential."

My bird boat excursion on the Source of the Nile consisted of eight Class 5 rapids. That's what I'd call a real-life Shits Creek – and I was definitely up it! Without going into all the gory details, suffice it to say that I survived the trip. In a letter home I mentioned Satan had stood the raft up on its end in the middle of something called a 'double hydo'. A double hydo consists of two towering geysers of water forming a deep hole in-between. I eventually lost my grip on the vertical raft. I got sucked into the black hole Satan had earlier described. When I finally broke the surface, I was immediately pounded by the second of the hydro pair. I was pretty sure I was going to die.

Many years later some good friends took Nancy and me to National Geographic's Ultra Sport film festival. The festival ended with the three top contenders for Ultra Sport film of the year. The winning film opened with a head shot framed in front of a pounding Class 5 rapid. A man turns to face the camera and opens his mouth revealing an iron spike pounded through his tongue. "My name is Satan," he growls at the camera, "and you're about to take the wildest ride of your life."

The last thing that happened before we left Madagascar was Y2K. At the turn of the millennium our time in Madagascar was drawing to a close. We were planning a holiday trip with our friends the Reddy's. John Reddy is actually responsible for the title of the collection of these tales on my website. We were at a resort having a drink together on an earlier trip when I started telling him my Uganda rafting tale. He lifted his hand in the three finger Boy Scout salute. "What's with the three fingers?" I asked, cutting my tale short. "I love your stories, Michael, and I'd listen to any of them twice," he said, always the gentleman. "But we need some way for me to signal when I've already heard them three times." Thus began my Thrice Told Tales.

But back to the millennium. It came loaded with fears of a societal collapse denoted by the shorthand 'Y2K'. There was a growing consensus that crossing the millennium would cause widespread computer clock failures. Y2Kers believed that '1900' was hard-coded into critical computer programs. This suggested that 1999 was coded only as '99', because the code assumed the '1900'. If that were the case, then '99 plus 1' would revert critical systems back to 1900 rather than jumping ahead to 2000.

The doomsday scenarios included airplanes falling from the sky and banking systems crumbling. In December, 1999, the Nairobi and Tanzania Embassy bombings were still recent memories. Now the scythe-clutching, hood-shrouded specter of Y2K was just ahead. Out of 'an abundance of caution', the Embassy required that we all 'shelter in place' over the New Year. So we were to remain in the capital, Antananarivo, as the clock struck 2000. And that put an end to our travel plans.

The USAID Director graciously offered to host a New Year's Eve at her home as consolation. At nine pm, December 31st, 1999, a large number of us showed up her gates. There was also a massive showing by the Locally Engaged Staff (LES). Each LES received a short-fused bottle rocket as they passed the main gate. I got a foot long sparkler instead. "I'd prefer one of those," I said, snatching a bottle rocket from one of the guards. When he offered token resistance, I said, "Gees, what's the problem? I'm not going to blow the place up." He reluctantly agreed.

We sipped champagne under the billowing folds of parachute tents scattered about the yard. As Y2K approached, the lawn filled with dazzling luminous trails of sparklers set alight. The first of the LES's sent his bottle rocket streaming into the night sky. I grabbed an empty bottle and a full box of matches from a nearby table. As I set my match to the fuse, the person next to me eyes grew wide. "You're under the tent," he said, jabbing his finger into the air. I glanced around in alarm and noted a large darken garage area behind me. I aimed the rocket on a horizontal trajectory and let it fly. The rocket streaked off towards the open garage and exploded inside with a loud bang. An instant later, five black-clad commandos charged out of the garage. Certain they were taking fire, they waved their submachine guns at the crowd, seeking potential targets.

"It was an accident," I shouted, waving madly to get their attention. "I did it. It was me. I shot my bottle rocket in there. It was me. I did it by mistake." For a moment they continued to scan, ready to shoot. Then the one in charge lowered his weapon and told the others to stand down. "Jesus Christ," he said, approaching me in disbelief. "That was a hair's breadth from bloodshed." I nodded and welcomed in the new century.

12. Total Financial Independence

I am not comfortable bringing up what I am about to bring up because it is not a topic people generally discuss. And while it shouldn't embarrass me, it does. I believe in God. It is hard to explain what I even mean by that. The God I believe in doesn't fit the standard image of our Christian God. There are no fiery clouds, no three-persons-in-one, no virgin births. All it means is I believe in a higher power that lends order and purpose to the universe.

It is not important whether you agree or disagree with me. I only mention it because it has influenced how I've spent my time. I used to pray in chapel every day during all four years of high school as part of my lunch break. When I went to college I upgraded from prayer to meditation, often accompanied by weed. I realize now that there was a kind of an emptiness in me. It manifested itself as a feeling of being ill-at-ease. It wasn't a big deal. It was more of a minor nuisance at, say, the level of a canker sore.

One day, stoned out of my mind, I found this little sheet of paper that had a prayer on it. It came from Jeremiah 29:13. That passage says 'You will find Me when you seek Me with all your heart'. And that's what the paper said. "Repeat 'I believe in God with all my heart' – three time and really mean it - and God will reveal Himself to you." So I said it. And I really meant it (and I was really stoned out of my mind). And I repeated it three times. And all of a sudden ba-bam! I heard the sound of the Universe. I shit you not. I heard the movement of the stars. I felt a power that was strong enough to move mountains – and I don't mean as a euphemism. I mean 'move mountains' in a literal sense. It scared the shit out of me.

I soon realized that it was actually the deep bass tones of a truck engine going by outside my window. Or maybe it was a reflection of the quality of the weed. It might have been my mind just fucking with me; a sound only heard inside my head. But whatever it was, I was (un)duly impressed. And have remained convinced that God revealed himself to me for lo these many years. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I've lived a good and faithful life. I'm just saying I believe in God. I'll get back to way I am pushing this point in a while. For now I just needed to let that out.

I spoke to my business partners before my return from Madagascar and Dave told me they'd be happy to have me back. Dave did say that Jim had a concern. Jim was Amy's right hand before we'd started the firm and now my third partner. Dave let me know that I'd have to make some sort of concession to get him to go along. Jim defined the pound of flesh he wanted to extract. He agreed that I could have my old position back but I wouldn't be re-admitted as a member of the Board. As a Vice President, I'd be able to make day-to-day decisions affecting my business. But I would need to run any significant business decision by the Board. Dave intervened on my behalf. He added that the arrangement would hold for only the first year.

I returned to a bit of a mixed bag. On the plus side, the firm was bigger and healthier than ever. The company won virtually every contract Amy targeted. We were up to 300 people and doing over $30 million in annual gross sales. That is very good for a young professional services firm.

On the minus side, our technology base was weak enough to be teetering. And our software development practice drove our business. Many of our deliveries were subpar and our clients were getting angry. Maybe worse, no one seemed to be aware that software applications were moving to the Web. Fortunately, I'd used my last year in Madagascar as a self-study opportunity. I was actually more current than I would have been even if I stayed working in DC. It took a lot of effort but I managed to turn the ship around.

I had also finished my third manuscript before leaving Madagascar. I spent part of each weekend editing it during the first year of my return. It was a techno-thriller about a robotics firm that needed to test a robotic arm. The arm worked by reading microchips implanted in the brain. The kicker was that, because the technology was so specialized, it needed a specific type of wound. The prototype trial needed someone with a left arm amputation below the elbow. With venture funding running out, the robotics company was getting frantic. They went to their last resort and contacted a criminal organization. They paid an organ harvesting crew to 'create' a victim with the necessary wound. The book was set in the Dominican Republic. It allowed me to put a bunch of sailing, sharks and Haitian voodoo culture in the mix.

One day I received a book contract in the mail. It was from a place called 'Books In Motion'. They signed on to make it into an audiobook, and it left me with my printed book rights still intact. What a deal!

But like my other publishing misadventures, this one was also doomed to fail. Two years down the road, I still had no audiobook in sight. Then I got a letter from them saying, 'Our business plans have changed. So has our Editor. We no longer plan to move forward with Cut Loose'. Oh well. I once again consoled myself with, 'I didn't like it very much myself'.

And while I am backtracking here, there is some back story relevant before moving forward. When I was a volunteer in Togo, I went to a parade in the capital. All the provincial Governors rode around in open motorcades. I noticed that each of these men wore unique but very similar head gear. The ornate masks consisted of two carved wooden faces worn atop the Governors' own heads. Each was original, some adorn with feathers, others with animal bones. When I mentioned the distinctive commonality, someone said they were all made by the same artesian. The guy was a said to have powerful magic and serious carving prowess. He mentioned the village he came from. It was a town I'd heard of on the border with Benin.

I realized that I would be passing within an hour of that village as I returned home. I decided to make a detour to see if I could find this guy. Sure enough, entering his village, he was quickly pointed out. He had a few carvings scatter about his shop and he agreed to sell me one. It was a primitive rough-hewn figure of a man pounding on a drum. We talked for a bit over a pot of local beer and I got around to asking about his masks. I steered the conversation to the head gear I'd seen the Chef Cirs wearing and asked if he might make me one. He hesitated, then changed the subject. I felt awkward enough that I decided not to bring it up again. I said goodbye and was heading for my motorcycle when he said, "I'll have your mask ready in four months." Then he asked if I could pay half his asking price up front.

Four months later I went back to the village very unsure of what I'd find. I pulled up in front of his shop and once again we shared a pot of beer. After a time he asked me to wait a moment while he went to get something. He returned with a two tiered mask in the style I'd seen each of the Chef Cirs wear – but this one was unique as well. The lower of the two mask faces was painted a startling shade of pink. He'd bordered the head in long hair and painted the chin with a beard. The huge eyes and parted lips lent the mask a menacing, diabolical, air. Above that face he'd carved a woman, naked to the waist. She clutched a huge python in each of her raised hands. Long black hair taken from a living source sprouted from her head and her bottom half was the body of a fish. I recognized her as the mermaid goddess Mami Wata, worshipped by a local cargo cult.

The term 'cargo cults' comes from the South Pacific where anthropologists first documented some islanders adopting a 'reconstruction' of European behavior they'd seen. In one example, islanders cleared land in the form of airplane runways. They even lined them with fire pots to guide the airplanes in, as they had seen the Europeans do. They expected that completing this ritual would cause the treasure-filled planes to appear, just as it had for the Europeans. The Togolese Mami Wata cult has a similar origin, except the planes were sailng ships. Mami Wata arrived on sailors' tattooed arms and the carvings on ships' prows.

"The mask represents the true you," the carver said. "When you wear it, you have three heads. On the bottom is your own living head. At the top is your protecting spirit. Between them we trap your evil spirit. Your protector is Mami Wata and one day she will make you very rich." I thanked him for the unattractive headgear and headed back to my own village.

I understood the power of the headdress as soon as I got home. Not a single villager would come into my mud rooms as long as that mask was visible. They'd shake their heads and point at it and tell me it was too powerful to be near. In fact, in the decade and a half I had that thing, no African ever agreed to be in the same room with it. Even after I got back to the U.S. I will return to the mask in a moment, but I want to get back to the company for now.

13. Merger & Acquisition

I'm not sure when I first learned that Dave Newton had lung cancer. I suspect it was before I got back to the States. He was my great friend, business partner and mentor. It was very difficult to hear of his condition, particularly in terms of survival rates. The 5-year survival rate for Stage 1 lung cancer patients is only 45%. For those diagnosed as Stage 4, only 1% will still be drawing breath five years hence.

Soon after my return, I gathered my team leads. In a real Asperger moment, I announced that we needed to envision a future without Dave. This pronouncement struck my team as insensitive, reprehensible, and cruel. I admit their sentiment caught me by surprise.

But it didn't stop me making my pronouncement to others. I took to saying that while Jim and I provided the brawn for client delivery, Dave and Amy were the brain and heart. I lumped them together because they were inseparable. They had lived, loved, worked and played together from the start. And now that Dave was sick and Amy was caring for him, neither one was very much around .

It wasn't long until I told Dave and Amy how I felt. They both brushed my 'lose our brain/heart' metaphor aside, insisting they would always be around. But, as time wore on, that was less and less the case.

No one wanted to acknowledge that Dave was dying. So the company plodded on as if everything was fine. But in reality, we were stumbling. Meetings ended without decisions, often with the words, "We need to bring this one to Amy and Dave."

I pushed the line that we needed to play the hand we were dealt and make decisions where we could. But I suffered from a hard-earned reputation for being a jerk. Few colleagues were inclined to follow my lead on 'taking charge', so the corporate lethargy ground on.

Then I took badgering Dave to a whole new level. "We've got three choices, as I see it," I said repeatedly. "One: you can get better and the two of you can resume your Directors' roles. Two: we can recruit some senior talent to replace your 'hearts and heads'. Or three: we can sell the company. 'One' isn't going to happen, so that leaves two or three." Over a several month periods, I sensed I was wearing them down.

One day, after I'd been back about a year, Dave came in and said, "Amy and I have decided we should sell the company." The pronouncement was particularly notable because Dave tended not to speak like this. He was too inclusive to use a phrase like "Amy and I have decided". They both worked hard to ensure that our decisions were consensus-based. His blunt talk of selling took the air out of the room. Even I, who had been pushing for this, felt myself gasping for breath.

It was ok for me to say that Dave was dying, but for him to allude to it? That was simply not allowed. He was a fighter, I reminded him. He didn't even know how to quit. But he told me this time I was wrong. He'd made peace with his limited future and wanted to ensure he used his remaining energy to do what was best for the company.

Once Dave made his mind made up, there was no changing it. He poured himself into finding us a buyer. He analyzed our competitive landscape and figured out who had the most to gain by acquiring us. Then he set about wooing the top three candidates. He didn't tell them that we were selling. Rather he seeded them with reasons why buying a company like ours would be good for them. It didn't take long for the seeds to sprout.

A rule of thumb is that professional services firms are worth half their full year's revenue. So, with forty million in expected revenue in 2010, we pegged our worth at twenty million bucks.

One of our prospective buyers was SRA International. They were a 7,000 employee company with 1.5 billion dollars in revenue. We knew and liked them and had a shared history. When we formed the company, they had helped us out by lending us office space. They wouldn't even take our offered rent payment two months later when we moved out. (In 2015, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) bought SRA. Combined, the newly named CSRA had revenues of 5.5 billion and 20,000 employees. Giving the plot away, this number included 400 professionals from our staff).

I had developed a 'quick no/slow yes' adage about business. It said that losses came as fast as a gut punch but wins trickle in. Winning was more like a 'maybe' moving to a 'probably'. Wins came in so slowly that you were never sure when they actually arrived.

To my surprise, Dave got SRA to quickly bite. He landed the deal within a couple months. But then my adage kicked in. The deal was more like a string of caveats. 'We'll buy you for 10 million. But we'll give you up to another 10 million if you reach this impossible level of new sales. And if you do it every year for the next three years. Without losing any key personnel. While transforming yourselves to look exactly like us. Without losing your identity because that's your Brand."

In the end, Dave delivered on every aspect of every stipulation and we walked out with twenty mil. When my first of several large checks came in – my first ever for over a million dollars – I felt like crying. The first check wasn't quite TFI, but the 'trickled yes' had begun.

Over the course of the next 18 months the money slowly accumulated. It eventually got to the amount I arbitrarily pegged as TFI. Fifteen years after taking the gamble of starting the company, we had all won a major hand. We each walked out with a couple of million. Except for Dave. He was once again proven right in trusting his gambler's instincts. His additional 75k investment netted him double our average take.

We have friends, Patti and Steve, who ran a high end design and build firm. They had done some terrific work remodeling our house. The Washington Post even featured the renovation on the front page of the Real Estate section. They were getting back from a trip to Costa Rica as we completed selling the firm. Steve called me and asked me to come by. There was an unusual tone of urgency in his voice. He was pouring over a set of architectural diagrams when I arrived. He pointed at a three ring binder beside him saying only, "Have a look."

Steve and Patti are some of the most well-travelled people we know. And Nancy and I have always admired their style and taste. They are not flashy in the money sense but they live with elegance and attention to detail. I asked Steve how he liked Costa Rica before opening the book. "It was great. As good a place as we have ever been. In fact we liked it so much, we bought a place." He nodded again to the binder. "Have a look." The binder contained a collection of photographs, brochures, floor plans and maps. The map showed a long stretch of beach, noted only as 'Turtle Preserve'.

"I found these great cabañas grandfathered into what is now the Parque National Marino Las Baulas. It means 'Leatherback Turtle National Marine Park'. It is the largest nesting colony of Leatherbacks on the Pacific coast. These things are amazing. Five feet long. 1,500 pounds."

The photos showed a small group of bungalows gathered in a jungle garden around a common pool. Terra cotta roofs and titled porches, everything finished in burnished hardwoods. I looked at him in disbelief. He and Patti knew that Nancy and I had been scouting exotic locales for the past fifteen years. We always kept an eye out for a vacation home in a rustic beach setting outside of the first world. "Goddamn it Steve," I said, "You know Nancy and I have been looking for this very thing for years."

He smiled and nodded. "I know. That's why I got you the bungalow next door. They're holding it for you until tomorrow." I was dumbfounded. "Count us in," I blurted out. We made our down payment the following week. It would be several months before we got down there to check it out.

A group of German investors owned the units and the Costa Rican put up some conditions for the sale. The Germans agreed to our using the place while they worked the final details out.

We managed to get down there a couple of times a year. We returned from each visit knowing that we had lucked into a little slice of paradise. But, as time wore on, we found ourselves no closer to settling on the deal. Then, on one visit a few years later, I noticed a 'for sale' sign on a medium sized house. It was on a large plot fronted by a lovely titled pool. I had always admired the house, which we passed on our way to the beach. I was fairly sure that it was beyond our means. Still, I knew the realtor and I figured it was worth asking about. He said he'd be there to show it to me in the afternoon.

Nancy and I were smitten as soon as we saw the place. It was decorated in colorful Spanish tiles. A large veranda surrounded it looking out over a well-kept garden. The place was open, airy, and lush. He told us that the owner wanted $250,000 for it. That was half the figure I had in mind. I said, "We'll take it," without a moment's hesitation. He shook his head sadly, "Sorry. There are two offers ahead of yours."

"When did it go on the market?" I asked.

"This morning," he said.

"This morning and you already have two offers?" He nodded solemnly. "Look, you know me," I pleaded. "I'm good for it. I can wire the money by the middle of this week." He looked at me thoughtfully, nodded again, and said, "I'll take it to the owner. I'll let you know what he says." We took possession of that lovely place by the end of the following week. As it happened, it was the same day we heard that the sale of the bungalow had finally gone through. Not exactly 'two for the price of one', but we've never regretted having both places. We've had over a hundred friends and family stay there and it has proven to be one of life's great joys.

But back to the sale of the company. SRA wanted to show how our acquisition came with opportunities. To demonstrate, they pulled me out of our group and dropped me into their newly conceived 'proposal tank'. I wasn't too thrilled about it as it took me out of my comfort zone and put me in a marketing role. But the proposal was for a $350 million contract to support all USAID's software and system's needs. They brought me on knowing I had worked on USAID systems in the field. I had also followed AID's IT operation with interest for several years. In fact, I had read five years earlier about CSC winning this very contract. I even remembered wondering at the time what kind of person ended up running such a significant systems job. I even thought it might be something I'd like to do, but I couldn't image how it could ever come about.

While a job this size was definitely punching above our weight class, SRA seemed to have a good handle on the work. And they put an excellent senior guy in to run the bid. After grilling me for a while, he added me as his lead for software development and support. We slogged through a grueling round of proposal reviews and panel interviews. Then, to my surprise, USAID awarded us the contract.

So I ended up running the very contract I had been dreaming about. It was tough going from the start, but I was able to make it all work. I managed to assemble a terrific team and, in a short time, we learned to love the work.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Dave was putting the finishing touches on the merger. He worked tirelessly to ensure all our staff were comfortable and well placed. He also fought hard to get our Vice Presidents placed in SRA as Vice Presidents. This was difficult because the SRA title required a larger business base than any of us had. Even so, he got them to agree.

Most of us were fearful that the acquisition would cause us to lose the MNG 'magic'. But it was still intact two years into the acquisition – and we even managed to keep every one of our staff. Dave deserves most of the credit for this. And he did it during the same six months he went through chemo and open heart surgery. On August the eleventh, almost on the day he collected the final payment on his millions, Dave died. His funeral was the largest any of the more than 500 attendees could remember. Amy flattered me by asking me to do the eulogy. Then she announced she'd endowed a charitable foundation in his name.

A year later, Nancy once again pulled her 'career' card. She let me know we would be moving to Tanzania. Just before we left, we had an out-of-town guest for dinner. He saw my African headdress of Mami-Wata and admired it. Then he told us about his own collection of occult objects. He said he was so serious about their power that he kept them on an altar he had built in-house.

I had always felt conflicted about that mask. On the one hand, I suspected it deserved some credit for delivering its long-promised riches. But that idea was blasphemous. Also, I was superstitious enough to wonder if giving the headdress away might result in me losing my payout. I decided the time had come to break this delusory bond. Our house guest left with the Mami Wata mask. And I am happy to report that at this juncture I still have the cash.

14. Fresh Start

I arrived in Tanzania with the kids in tow a month after Nancy arrived there. It was the eighteenth of August, 2004, and my fiftieth birthday. I was eager to begin writing again. And best of all, now that I had achieved total financial independence, I could write without worrying if it would generate income. I couldn't believe my luck!

I was writing for two or three hours every morning from our small house on Dar's Masaki peninsula. It is the most fashionable address in a town whose name translates as City of Peace. After writing, I'd take our fat American lab for a slow run along the Indian Ocean. Then I'd shower, buy the local paper, and read it over lunch at one of the local cafés.

I'd been into that routine for a few weeks when our pup, Alika, abruptly sat down in the middle of the run. She absolutely refused to budge. She was as sweet an animal as ever graced the Earth. And she was generally so deferential that I decided to give in to her resisting our forward progress. At least this once.

But the following day she sat down in exactly the same spot and I'd had about enough. The spot was at the top of a fifty meter dash along a narrow path through a patch of Prickly Pear cactus. It was also the only stretch of the run that dipped below grade of the road along the cliff, so I dubbed it 'the Valley of Death'. Alika (her name is the Malagasy word for 'dog') finally gave in to my ever more aggressive tugging. Once she got up, she was fine for the rest of the run.

Or she was fine as far as we got. On our return, we once again descended into the Valley of Death. The path through it was narrow enough that she had to trot behind me. At the half way point, the cactus exploded and a large nearly naked man jumped out of a concealed blind. He smashed two bottles together, yelling, "Give me your money!" I jumped back and immediately assumed my often practiced karate stance. I responded, yelling, "I'll kill you!"

He looked startled for a minute. Then he shook his head and laughed. "No. I'll kill you," he said, slashing at me with the bottle shards. As I jumped out of the way, I yelled, "Alika! Attack!" In all fairness to her, it was the first time she'd ever heard the word. She cocked her head and took a step back. Too late, I realized she had been born without anything like an 'attack' gear. So I continued back-pedaling as he continued to lung. Then, stumbling on the shattered glass, I lost my footing and tumbled to the ground. He was on me in a second holding one bottle to my throat as he dropped the other bottle to grab my hand. Then he started to put my ring finger in his mouth.

"Goddamn," I shouted, "Don't bite my finger off. I'll give you the ring." Again he began to laugh. "I'm not going to bite it off," he said. "I just need to get it wet so I can get the ring off."

"That's disgusting," I replied, working to get the ring off by myself. He took the ring along with my sunglasses and then he began to stand back up. As he did, I felt his hands run down along my legs. When they got down to my shoes, he quickly snatched them off as well.

I got back to my feet and noticed I was bleeding quite a bit from a gash below my knee. I removed one of the shards of glass I'd fallen on as I watched him run off down the path. Then I headed back towards the road.

The U.S. Ambassador's residence was very close by so I went there and hailed his security team. I explained that I was an 'official' American and I'd just been robbed across the street. "He only has two ways out and I watched the one leading north so he must have headed south." The guard looked at me skeptically and then put his radio to his mouth. He started speaking Swahili and I didn't understand a word.

Fifteen minutes later, I was still standing in the road trying to staunch my bleeding leg. I told the guard that, as there didn't seem any reason to stay, I'd be on my way. He nodded towards an on-coming pickup truck and said, "Give it a second."

When the pickup pulled up, I saw three security guards in the pickup bed kicking the shit out of someone. "Is this the guy?" they asked, telling him to lift his head. Having noted my attacker had half his face melted from some ancient burn, I was able to confirm with yes, they'd caught the right guy. "This your ring?" another asked, holding it aloft. "He was trying to swallow it when we tackled him. You better get that leg looked at and then we'll meet you at the police station." I thanked them and told them that this sounded like a good plan.

Several hours later I arrived at the station with my wound cleaned and stitched. The Embassy guards were nowhere to be seen. The sergeant at the desk said that they needed a sworn statement from me. He also nodded toward the rear of the cavernous dark room. "And he wants to talk to you." I squinted to see who he was referring to but didn't see anyone. Then he said, "You can go on back." When my eyes adjusted, I saw that there was a heavy metal grate stretched across half of the back wall. The flat iron took up more of the grid than the open space, making it difficult to see through. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness within, I could make out a teeming mass of men. Among them I noted the burnt visage of my attacker, holding a small boy aloft. "Mister, this man wants you to save him," the child said in passable English. "He is begging you to let him out." I shook my head in resignation before making my way back home.

That night I dreamed of him standing before a firing squad. Before he died, I said, "I told you I'd kill you – and I meant it." I woke with a terrible start. That morning, still troubled by the dream, I went to a local cafe and bought some food. I picked up a bag of apples, some rolls and a small container filled with eggs. Then I made my way back to the jail. The officer at the desk said I'd have to get permission from the chief before he'd let me see the prisoner. The chief gave me a hard look when I told him I'd brought food for my assailant. "What, are you a priest?" he demanded. When I assured him I wasn't, he said, "Well, do you think we don't feed our prisoners?" I replied that I understood that was left to prisoners' families. My assailant probably hadn't had a chance to tell anyone he was in jail. The chief smiled, saying, "Yes, you're right. Prisoners have to arrange for their own food." Then he told me to go wait in an adjacent room.

A short time later, two officers arrived flanking my assailant who entered crawling on all fours. Before I could offer him the food, one of the police grabbed it and opened up the sack. "Sorry, but you'll need to have a bite of something first. Pick whatever you want." I chose a roll and took a bite. Then my eyes bulged wide as I grabbed my throat and began to choke, staggering around.

They reacted in horror, unsure what to do, until I let up on my obvious little act and told them I was joking with them. All three of them got a hoot out of that. When they offered him the bag, he eagerly took an egg. To my embarrassment, the egg ran down his hands when as cracked it open. But he swallowed the remaining raw yoke down anyway. "I'm so sorry," I apologized, "I thought they were cooked."

"Never mind," he replied. "It was just what I needed...and it tasted really good."

In the end he drew me a map of his section of town and pointed out where his people lived. I promised to get word to them that he was being held, and the police returned my wedding ring on my way out.

By way of getting closure, I went to check on him sometime later in the year. The police said they'd transferred him to another prison. They didn't have any more information than that.

Shortly thereafter, I began working for the Dar Guide, Tanzania's largest circulation magazine. I'd gotten to know some investigative journalist by then. I filled one of them in on my efforts to check on the prisoner. I said I'd give him fifty bucks for anything he could find. He got back to me and confirmed that they guy was eventually released. I was relieved to know I hadn't killed him after all.

Here I need to go back a bit to lend the next episode context. One night, shortly after I'd returned from Peace Corps, my brother Bill and I were sitting around having a couple beers. He mentioned a woman he was spending a lot of time with and I asked if they had anything serious going on. He said, "Oh no, it's not like that." And I said, given how attractive I thought she was, he must be either blind or gay. Bill responded, "Yep, I'm that."

I was pretty sure he wasn't blind, so I realized he was telling me he was gay. He was my best friend and yet somehow I had never thought about his sexual orientation. He said he had kept it to himself because it upset a lot of people. I assured him his secret was safe with me.

Only it wasn't because I am notoriously bad at keeping secrets. So I almost immediately began causing him pain and embarrassment. He was good about dealing with all the problems my big mouth created. Suffice it say he didn't remain in the closet long once he shared in confidence with me. I apologize for that. Then, within a decade, he let me know he had tested positive for HIV.

In those early days, AIDS was a death sentence. For newly infected and on treatment, today, it is more of a chronic condition. But 37 million people have died from it and a million more are still dying every year. Every minute of every day two people die from AIDS.

Back when Bill got infected, people knew the primary pathway was same-sex sex. Discrimination and stigma became the norm. They still are, but to a somewhat lesser extent. Without hope of survival, many of those who suspected they might be infected decided not to find out. Brother Bill was one of those. By the time he got tested, Bill had full blown AIDS. His doctor told him he only had two years to live.

The closest my Asperger's Syndrome has ever allowed me to get to empathy was on his fortieth birthday in New York. I met him at a high-end cocktail lounge he frequented. I had on one of my three-year old daughter's fake diamond stud earrings as a joke.

"You asshole," he blurted as soon as he saw me. "You knew I've been wanting one of those and so you had to get one first." I let him stew in it for a while. Then I pulled the paste-on earring off.

A few martinis later I watched as a tattoo parlor artist put a hole through Bill's lower ear. The guy said Bill had bought both earrings, and he'd be happy to pierce my ear for free. At that moment, it seemed like a pretty good idea.

I hardly noticed Bill's blood on the needle...but there was hell to pay when Nancy found out. We checked the internet and found out that she was right about a shared needle as a viable pathway. She cut me off from unprotected sex until I tested clean for HIV. That night, I realized for the first time what Bill's death sentence meant to him. I felt tears run down my cheek. But then it probably wasn't empathy. It is more likely I was crying for myself.

It has now been thirty years since the doctor told Bill he had two more years to live. His partner, Bob, died of AIDS twenty years ago. But Bill is in the tiny group called 'those the longest surviving with AIDS'. He remains hale and hearty to this day.

But back to where I began: writing. It wasn't going well. Six hundred pages into it – representing 4 fresh starts – I still had only the barest notion of where I wanted it to go. It would be about testing a genetic modification in Tanzanian cattle. The modification would contaminate Maasai cows. The Maasai are a nomadic people who live in and around some of the big Tanzanian game reserves. They have a strong warrior culture and are proud of their traditions. Tanzanians treat the Maasai with reverence and respect. My primary source was a Maasai leader I had gotten to know quite well...but more about that in a bit.

I arrived in Tanzania determined not to make the same bad-entry errors I had in Madagascar. I still demurred when offered trailing-spouse work at the Embassy, but I explained I had other gainful employment in mind. In truth, I didn't, but I knew better than to say I wanted to sit at home and write. Now, with my writing not going well, I determined to turn my white lie into truth.

After MNG, I featured myself something of an entrepreneur. I also thought I would like to teach. So I went up to the University of Dar es Salaam and found the Center for Entrepreneurial Development. It was in the business school. I left the director a copy of my resume along with a note saying I'd love to chat.

The office scheduled me an appointment with the director for Wednesday, November 3, 2004. People who knew him warned me the director was a radical socialist. He had studied at the knee of the Great Teacher, Tanzania's first President, Julius Nyerere. They went on to say that he had no love for Americans.

When we met, I began by saying I had firsthand experience in building a successful business. I said I thought I could help students with their assignment to develop business plans. I also said I had experience with 'angel investor' clubs. I wanted to engage local high net worth individuals in a 'fast pitch' forum. The idea was we'd have a monthly breakfast and the entrepreneurs would pitch their plans. The angels would decide if any of them were worthy of investment. I told him I'd participated in such a forum in the US. He greeted my offer with open skepticism.

Part way into the discussion I said I felt compelled to take a brief detour. I said I was very disappointed with the morning's news. Americans had doubled-down on our previous mistake by re-electing George W. Bush. I ended by apologizing. I said, "A wise man once said, The US elections are far too important to the world to be left to Americans alone."

He looked shocked. Then he demanded, "Do you have any idea who said that?"

To which I replied, "Of course. The Great Mwalimu (Teacher). Julius Nyerere." The director reached his hand across the table and said, "You're hired."

That pro-bono position brought me many excellent experiences. One of the best was my friendship with Mike Ole Mokoro – known across Tanzania as Maasai Mike. I mention him here because I want to relate a lion story but I need to first tell one of Mike's. After we got to know each other at the University, Mike started coming around to the house. One evening he showed up for dinner with a couple of village elders in tow. At some point in the evening, Mike left the room. I chose that moment to ask something I'd been wondering about. "We hear so much about the Maasai and lions...I know this is trite, but do you know people who have actually killed one?"

They looked at each other and started to laugh. "You don't know? Neither of us has killed a lion. But Mike has. He's killed three," they reported with pride.

When Mike returned I quizzed him about it. He said, "I will tell you about first one. I was tending my father's cattle alone when I was thirteen. I saw lion spring from the grass and land on my father's prize bull. The noise that lion made was crazy and he had the bull down by its throat. I wanted to run away and hide but I knew my father would be very angry if I didn't do something. So I gathered up my courage and I ran up to the lion and I hurled my spear with all my might. It was a good throw. The spear stuck deep in his shoulder. But lions are incredibly tough. He jumped up and ran at me. Luckily, I was near a tree. I got up that tree so fast I almost escaped him." "Almost?" I asked. He smiled and asked Nancy to excuse herself. When she'd left the room he dropped his pants. His right leg was torn with deep trenches running from his hip almost to his knee. "My God. What did you do?" I asked.

"What could I do? I stayed up in the tree. He sat at the base of it with my spear in his shoulder. His breathing got heavier and heavier and about two hours later he died. Then I climbed down, cut off his tail and took it home."

Tanzania's lions fascinate me. They are awesome animals. I remember one night years before I was been sleeping in a camp in Botswana. My tent was beside a pride of lions. They had kept me awake all night by their continuous unnerving soul-shaking roars. The next morning I asked my guide if they always roared that loud at night. He said, "They weren't roaring – that's how deep they breathe."

I had been following the tribulations of a small town south of Dar for several weeks. Here is a summary of it I found on BBC. "A man-eating lion linked to the deaths of at least 35 people in southern Tanzania may have killed because it had toothache, wildlife experts believe. They say the lion probably switched from hunting buffalo to humans because it found the meat less painful to chew. The lion stalked its prey in eight villages in the coastal Rufiji River district over a period of 20 months."

What the article doesn't say is it the details constitute one of the more incredible lion stories ever. I related it to a group from our US Embassy there who had gathered at a dinner welcoming a new chief of mission. I related an article I had recently seen about a woman who lived near the Rufiji River. She was, they reported, 'answering the call of nature' late one night when the lion attacked. Her husband, hearing her screams, grabbed his spear and managed to chase the lion away. Unfortunately, he was too late to save his wife

After carrying her body into the house. Then he realized that this man-eater was bound return to finish off his meal. The man made the painful decision to end the town's terror by killing the lion, using his wife's body as bait. He tied her corps to a tree and waited for the lion. When it came back he managed to kill it with his spear.

As I finished this story, the new agency lead – off a recent messy divorce – howled with delight. "Best damn use of a wife I've ever heard!" Many of those gathered remained upset with him for months. In fairness though, he turned out to be an effective (if misogynistic) chief.

I mention that now because I went to work for him the following month. There was a position announced for what they refer to as 'EFMs' or extended family members. EFM jobs are low-paying positions designed for spouses of personnel posted abroad. I was happy enough with my writing, sailing, and the work I'd found. But AIDS was so personnel to me that I couldn't turn down an opportunity to go to work for PEPFAR. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is a seven billion dollar a year program designed to address global AIDS. The pandemic was threatening to destabilize many countries, particularly in Africa. Here's how UNAIDS began their 2004 annual report:

"In 2003, an estimated 4.8 million people...became newly infected with HIV. This is more than in any one year before. Today, some 37.8 million people...are living with HIV, which killed 2.9 million...in 2003, and over 20 million since the first cases of AIDS were identified in 1981."

15. Trials and Tremors in TeaZed

In 2004, one in ten Tanzanians were HIV positive and the infection curve was steepening. Given my brother's history, I felt a strong urge to do something about the disease in Tanzania. I took the EFM position and did everything I could.

My efforts were reward in an unexpected way. The USAID Director, Pam White, mentioned that the AIDS program was opening a new position. She said several people in Mission leadership suggested I should apply. This was a real US employee position, not an EFM slot. It came with significant program responsibilities and a salary to match. The job came out as a 'social marketing' position, so I decided to re-invent myself. I restructured my experience to make myself look qualified. I managed to land the position with only minor stretches of the truth.

The agency team said Pam thought they were being too flat-footed in their communications effort. They said she was insistent that billboards saying 'use condoms' would never do the trick. "Convincing people to buy something they don't think they need isn't new...we need a Madison Avenue approach. Who here handles that?" she'd demand. They'd sheepishly point at me.

Nancy knew I was a little out of my league with the new job. She decided to help by sending me a review of a new book called 'Made to Stick'. Written by Dan and Chip Heath, it zeroes in on what makes certain ideas memorable. It is an elaboration of Malcolm Gladwell's 'sticky idea' principle from his book 'The Tipping Point'. Knowing I would benefit from reading it, she added it to my Christmas list. I read the book the moment it came out.

I liked it so much I bought eight more copies to spread around my team. I also left one on Pam's desk with a note saying it was a great read. Within the hour, Pam came by my cube holding the book and saying, "Thanks but I've read a million of these." She tried to give it back but I wouldn't take it. "Just read the first chapter," I implored.

First thing the following morning she was back at my desk. "I couldn't put it down," she said. "I read it straight through last night." Then she tapped the cover and said, "Get these guys on the phone." I was like 'What? Get these guys on the phone'? But then I thought, 'I guess I could try.'

I wrote them a brief email describing what we were doing to address AIDS in Tanzania. I mentioned that I liked the book so much I bought a bunch of copies and passed them out. Chip wrote back almost immediately saying, "Wow, you're the first person we've heard from. To tell you the truth, we didn't even know it had been released." Per Pam's insistence, I asked them if we could have a call. They immediately agreed.

As usual, Pam was on a roll. On the first call she said there was nothing sticky about the AIDS messaging in Tanzania. Then she said we needed their professional help...oh yeah, but we couldn't pay. Then she asked if they'd ever been on a safari. They said no, but they'd always wanted to. She said, "Well what if we could pay to get you here and pay your lodging. Would you work a week or two for free?" She added, "I guarantee Mike will take you on safari over the weekend." After a bit of hemming and hawing, the brothers both agreed.

By the time they arrived a few weeks later they already had an idea for their approach. They'd done a lot of home work and we'd had a lot of calls. They honed in on the problem of AIDS spreading through 'inter-generational sex'. That is, older men sleeping with school girls. The problem was both endemic and tolerated in Tanzania. Dan Heath explained his idea for creating change through negative social norms. He suggested we shame the bad behavior using humor. He proposed a strategy. Wouldn't it be fun if we could make older men chasing young girls the butt of jokes?

Their solution was ingenious. We assembled a group of local talent. The Heath's introduced the technical approach. Then the locals created a culturally appropriate lampoon about a character named 'Fataki'. Well, actually, I should let them tell it. I just found a narrative of a segment that aired on the PBS News Hour three months after their visit. I include the transcript here:

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, tackling AIDS through prevention. On the eve of World AIDS Day, President Bush asked for more money today to help fight AIDS. A key part of that is prevention.

The 10 minute feature ends with this:

SUSAN DENTZER (Speaking to the viewers): The U.S. program's support of HIV-fighting efforts like these are likely to get a close look soon in Washington. The original five-year program was passed in 2003, but to continue beyond 2008 it will have to be extended by Congress. And experts say that, in the future, the program will have to focus more than ever on areas like prevention. Global AIDS coordinator Dybul told us that means thinking of new ways to reach young people around the world.

MARK DYBUL: There are organizations in the private sector that live and die on whether or not they change a young kid's behavior, whether it's going to a movie or drinking a certain soda or buying a certain toy. We need to take that type of messaging, that type of 21st-century approach.

SUSAN DENTZER: We got a glimpse of that future recently in this impromptu recording studio in Dar-es-Salaam. A group of Tanzanian actors was taping an anti-HIV radio spot.

The radio spot was the brainchild of a Stanford Business School professor, Chip Heath. He was brought over by the U.S. Global AIDS Program to help craft a new HIV prevention campaign.

CHIP HEATH, Stanford University: One of the important problems in Tanzania is intergenerational transmission of AIDS. You get older, wealthy men picking up young women and infecting them with AIDS, because poverty is such an issue that the young women are seduced by these older, wealthier, more distinguished men.

SUSAN DENTZER: So Heath told us he and his colleagues invented the character Fataki, or Swahili for explosion, to try to create an influential negative cultural stereotype.

CHIP HEATH: Fataki is this lecherous character that's always trying to pick up women in some form. He's wealthy. He's smooth. But in every case, when he tries to pick up a young woman, there will be a friend in the positive messages that intervenes and says, "Don't you know that guy? His wife died of AIDS." And then they start running away, and Fataki is going, "Hey, wait, baby, what's wrong?"

The announcer comes on and says, "Don't let your friends fall prey to Fataki." And what we're hoping is that it's going to become a catchphrase. "He's such a Fataki. You know, he's such a lecher."

Three months after that program aired, Congress passed the PEPFAR Reauthorization bill and funded it at $50 billion over five years. That amount was sixty percent higher than the original amount and a full $20 billion more than the president requested in his budget. Two years after that, a research team found that 'Fataki' was now a regularly used Swahili term which connoted a lecherous man preying on young woman.

The Heath brothers went on to write another best-seller. This one is called "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard". The book provides a blueprint for creating impactful change. It ranges in scope from small organizational change to changes at the social order level. The book ends by using Fatiki as one of several examples of large social change. The Heath brothers graciously credit Pam and me with the work. In truth is was all them.

The time in Tanzania was the most 'storied' time of my life. There were countless incredible safaris and exotic places like Zanzibar. I even had my own little teak sailboat out in the middle of the wide Indian Ocean. And my work there included a little bit of everything. Once I was even assigned as point person on a Presidential visit to Arusha.

'Point person' may be pushing it as there was a revolving door of leads. For example, there was the overall Bush visit to Tanzania lead. Then there was a kid from the White House who arrived late and took the Arusha lead from me. He immediately fucked things up. Then there was the Hollywood producer who came in at the very end. He was a real pro – always focused on what he called 'the money shot'.

So much happened in Tanzania. I was even approached by the CIA. They recruited me hard during this period as well. I didn't take them up on it, but it did happen. That said, I will hold myself to three last tales.

Around this same time, I had a problem with a tooth. Years earlier in Togo, I had broken my tooth on a pebble. It was common practice in Togo to use pebbles to assist in cleaning husks off rice, and my lunch lady at my village market had forgotten to remove them all. It was the last time I bit hard into market food without first feeling around it with my tongue.

I had the tooth repaired in London, while I was visiting Shallah. The British dentist pegged me as a medical tourist from the U.S. trying to take advantage of their free dental plan. He refused to check my teeth until I explained my situation. "Ok, I'll fix it," he said, "but I'll make the cap only last one year. Then you can get it properly fixed – and pay for it – when you get back to the States". I happily agreed. And I had that cap for the next thirty years.

I finally lost it while I was working for the Embassy in Dar. Until that day, the Embassy sent anyone with a serious tooth issue to South Africa for treatment. South African hospitals and dentistry are excellent. The Tanzanians ones, not so much. But somehow that policy changed the day that I needed my tooth work done. It seemed a miracle had occurred and suddenly there were a couple of local docs who were completely up to snuff.

I am not sure why I got snookered so easily, but I nodded and went along. Next thing I knew, I was in the dental chair of a sixty year old Ukrainian sporting a ponytail to the middle of his back. He had the rugged fitness of an ex-con, and I was pretty sure he was on the run. He asked three heavily-bosomed assistants to make me comfortable. They did this by snuggling me between their six enormous breasts. Then he went to work.

I was quite comfortable at first and delighted with the comforts of his chair. But when he announced I needed a root canal, my comfort disappeared. When he said, "I will start the work now, but I don't use anesthetics," I jumped out of the chair. "I give you my word," he said soothingly, "you will not feel any pain."

As I say, I'm not sure why I suckered so easily, but I was suckered here again. "Tell me the moment you feel any pain," he insisted, as though I might have tried to tough it out. To his credit, he stopped as soon as I raised my hand. "Now I just need to pack the tooth with arsenic," he told me. "That will ensure that we kill the nerve. That will be the end of it for today. But we need to keep at it, little by little, until the root is completely dead." As it turned out, he proved to be as good as his word. Over the course of half a dozen treatments, he managed to painlessly kill the nerve.

He also mentioned that the tooth would need a crown – a service he could not provide. Instead he set a gold stick in the hole and built a temporary tooth around it. He promised it would hold until my return to the States the following year.

As promised, the tooth held until I could see my dentist back in the States. My State-side dentist was incredulous when I told him I had a root canal without anesthetics. He told me on my follow up visit that he had researched the arsenic treatment I'd described. He said he'd found that the treatment was fairly standard dentistry in the States as well. Then he added, "Back in the late eighteen hundreds". As he finished the repair he also added, "I have to say, I am very impressed with the job he did. Given the conditions you must have been in, I doubt he could have done a better job."

Then, in July 2007, we took a trip with friends from home. The Ngorongoro Highlands hike takes place in the Maasai country behind the fabled crater. The long, arduous and always beautiful hike ends at the summit of the Mountain of God. That's what he Maasai call it, Ol Doinyo Lengai. The peak is over ten thousand feet tall and it is an active volcano. The sheer mud and rock walls rise like an industrial smokestack, denuded and vertical. Both of my kids had already climbed it and told of the dangers and awesome views. Along with Nancy, they had both climbed Kilimanjaro as well. Kili is almost 20,000 feet at its peak.

Luke and I were to meet Nancy and Kate, along with our friends, in Arusha the day before starting the hike. On the way up the Rift Valley, a driver headed in the opposite direction lost control of his car. He came careening across the road immediately in front of us. His car raced up an earthen embankment and went airborne, landing on its roof. I was the first person to get to him.

I found him alive but wedged beneath the steering wheel. One of his legs had pushed through the floorboard of the car. Within seconds a group of Tanzanians joined me and some began issuing instructions. "We have to turn the car back over," someone said, and instantly the crowd mobilized to flip the car. "Give me his cell phone," another cried out. Within a minute he'd managed to get the man's wife on his phone. They worked with partnership and confidence and soon had the guy out of the car and lying on the grass.

I went back to the car marveling at the display of courage and compassion. Their lack of institutional support has created a beautiful network of interpersonal support.

Luke and I continued up the road to our restaurant meet-up in Arusha. As we approached our group's table, I felt my foot miss a step. I managed to keep upright only by grabbing the back of a nearby chair. The waiter going by me with a tray of glasses grabbed hold of a chair at the same moment. It took me a second to realize that the water jumping in the glasses reflected the trembling of the ground. "Earthquake?" I asked him. He smiled and nodded. "Get them often?" He responded that was the first one he'd ever felt.

The first was followed by a series of rolling aftershocks. The radio reported that the Mountain of the Gods, Lengai, was erupting. There was talk of shutting down the Ngorongoro Crater National Park. But Nancy insisted that we were still hiking and I agreed it didn't hurt to go on out there and have a look. The Park is actually a 'conservation area'. It includes a controlled-access game reserve at its cratered center. Unlike other game parks in Tanzania, the conservation area is home to both human and animals. And its boundaries are not fixed by a fence. As a result, no one was there to say the area was closed to hikers. We set out, as planned, the following day. The first hike was twenty kilometers across the Ngorongoro highlands. It ended on a mountain overlooking the smoking stack of Lengai.

Our friends were duly anxious as we approached the rumbling, smoking mount. When evening fell, they let us know they had made a family decision to turn back. I asked them to think about dangers involved with heading back at night. I urged them to sit it out in the shadow of the volcano. They were reluctant, but agreed to wait for daylight before trekking back.

I told Nancy what they had decided when I got back to our tent. She immediately lit in about what chicken-shits are travelling companions were. The moment she said it, an earthquake struck so hard it landed Nancy on her ass. I told her I took that as a bit of a sign and she finally gave in. We wouldn't complete that spectacular hike until the following year. Here's what Wikipedia says about that week:

"Volcanic activity in the mountain caused daily earth tremors in Kenya and Tanzania from 12 July 2007 until 18 July 2007 at 8.30pm in Nairobi. The strongest tremor measured 6.0 on the Richter scale. Geologists suspected that the sudden increase of tremors was indicative of the movement of magma through the Ol Doinyo Lengai. The volcano erupted on 4 September 2007, sending a plume of ash and steam at least 18 kilometers (11 mi) downwind and covering the north and west flanks in fresh lava flows."

16. The End

The last thing I want to mention is perhaps the most important to me. While working for USAID/Tanzania, I got routine messages about a new systems development activity. The system, called COPRS 2, was to be used for program management. It would track PEPFAR's progress in achieving program goals. That meant it was exactly the type of system I had been working on for my entire systems career.

I found I couldn't read these messages without getting a little jealous of the guy who signed them as the systems lead. How, I wondered, did Mark Landry land a job like that? I felt very fortunate to have gotten a great position in the Global AIDS program at USAID. But I kept thinking about how much more I could do if I were in my native systems domain.

Shortly before the end of my tour in Tanzania, my good friend and split-time boss, Tracy Carson, called. She said she remembered me mentioning that I had a systems development background. She said that management was losing confidence in the systems team they had in place. They wondered if I was interested in helping them define a way forward.

I immediately accepted her offer. Then I outlined what I thought needed to be done. A few weeks later they asked me if I'd be interested in doing the work. I could hardly contain my enthusiasm.

I thought we needed a system with all the attributes proposed for the new global COPRS2. Our local system needed more granularity, down to the specific health facility. But other than that, the requirements were basically the same. My schedule had me going back to Washington for my current work, so I built in a meeting with the COPRS team as well. Mark, the team lead, was amenable to the idea of building these systems in concert. He took it a step further and made his systems development contract available to us.

When I got back to Tanzania, I thought long and hard about how to present my findings to management. I wanted them to understand my purposed approach and the value of the opportunity we had to align our work. I also wanted to do the work myself. The problem was that my term with USAID/Tanzania was running out and I was planning to return to Washington.

A couple days before the meeting in which I planned to make my pitch, I got the distinct impression that I was somehow destined to do this work. Two days later, senior management agreed to my proposal. They supported my leading the effort from back in Washington, DC. Then Mark got me a position as a contract employee on his team. When, a year later, Mark left his post with State Department, he told his boss that he should hire me to lead the global work.

Mark's boss, Paul Bouey, asked me if I wanted to take a job as a State Department employee. I said yes of course I wanted the job. But I didn't see how that was possible given the job requirements and competitive rules for awarding government jobs. The next thing I knew the State Department offered me a 5 year political appointment to do the work. It turned out to be the easiest way they had to offer me the job. A few weeks later, I was running the systems portfolio for the Global AIDS program as a State Department employee.

I retired from the State Department two years ago with a handshake from Secretary of State John Kerry. By the time I left in 2015, I had fielded a global program management system called DATIM. The system opened to 12,000 invited users the first day it deployed. It collected program results from more than 77,000 health facilities and other sites in 50 countries around the world. In its first month of operation, PEPFAR recorded 1.3 million unique results.

While I am routinely credited with delivering the system, that is not how I see it. First, there were tons of talented people involved. It never would have happened without each of them. But there is a second factor I think about. Over the five years it took to conceive of and deliver the system, we encountered obstacles at every turn. Yet every obstacle we met with magically vanished. And every time we needed something it wondrously appeared. For example, every time someone opposed this work, a boss stepped in to tell them to get on board. If we needed extra money, the money truck arrived.

I can't explain how all the necessary pieces fell into place. I can only say that they all did. And there were tons of things that needed to come together to get this system out. But here's my bottom line (as crazy as it sounds): it feels like deployment of a unified global health management information system had some unseen guiding hand.

Now, when I consider the time I spent trying to be a writer, I remember the Yiddish proverb: Man plans, God laughs. When I think of the compulsion I felt to take on the PEPFAR systems work, I think of Romans 12 6:8. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is...serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach. I am grateful for the grace of systems work.

Now, as I sit at my desk here in Tonga in 2018, I am happy I can say:

My kids, Kate and Luke, are both healthy and well credentialed. They are both working at jobs they love and living on their own. Nancy is the Peace Corps Country Director here – a position she has always hoped for. And I have had the great good fortunate of being married to her for thirty years.

I am still working with PEPFAR and the systems team at State. And I relish my opportunity to write most every evening.

Here's my bottom line: If you're one of those who finds they need a Plan B, I hope you find, as I have, it is in addition to Plan A. Because no matter what else I do, I will always continue trying to write a book someone might actually want to read.
