Hail, lightning and pigs’ legs

“You desire new frontiers,” read my fortune after a friend and I shared a Chinese dinner. “It's time to travel.”

It's true, as are the tales I shall tell on these pages, tales that now stir my memory, that make me laugh, make me cringe, make me wonder at my own naiveté and make me marvel at the world’s intricacies.

Although I now live in my native Ventura, the paths that have taken me away from here and back remain vividly etched in my mind. But there will always be more tales to tell. There are more roads to take, more maps to unfold, more corners to turn. Here are but a few.

Carcassonne

Nine years before the date of this writing I find myself in southern France, crashing in a hostel on the edge of the port city of Marseille. I take a day trip to Cassis, where the town climbs the cliffs surrounding a beautiful, but rocky, beach. I spend the afternoon reading William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” drinking Fanta and enjoying the sunlight.

By the time I get to bed I am on fire. It feels as if sunburn and a fever that had been slowly building the past two days have conspired to incinerate me. I can’t sleep.

I finally take a cold shower, find some clothes and leave without breakfast. I get on the first train toward Carcassonne, a restored, almost Disney-like walled medieval city to the Southwest. My excitement begins to take hold, knowing I will stay that night in a hostel in the heart of the castle.

But I am exhausted by the time I arrive. I stop to withdraw money at a bank then begin the 45-minute hike up the hill to the castle. All I want to do is sleep and recover. When I arrive there are still two hours until the lockout is over at the hostel, so I buy a newspaper. I find a quiet spot between two sets of walls to sit and read in as much shade as I can find, but I can’t escape the sun as it beats on my still-burning skin.

When the lockout is over I immediately get a key and head to my four-bed room, where I have little to say to the Australian preparing to leave. An hour or two later I awake, groggy and achy. I reach into the pillow for the satchel with my passport, money and important documents and find it gone.

Panicking I scramble about, wondering if in my fatigue I forgot to leave it in its normal spot. I can’t find it anywhere. When I track down the Australian in the hostel lobby he plays innocent, but I’m certain he has stolen it. Still, it seems far-fetched that he would, so I decide reluctantly to retrace my footsteps.

Outside, the shops begin to close up. A light rain begins to fall. I have no umbrella, only the newspaper I read earlier. The further I walk in my fevered state, the worse my rain and mood get. There’s no business to do in a downpour so the town is soon emptied.

I find where I was reading the paper. There is no shelter between the inner and outer walls, but I need to see if I lost my satchel there, despite thunderclaps that seem to be nearing their crescendo. As soon as I step into the open space I am pelted with hail. I run toward the outer wall, scratching at the ground desperately in search of my lost documents.

Suddenly, my entire field of vision fills with light just as a tremendous boom silences every other sound. Deafened, my skin on fire as million hailstones and raindrops pelt my sunburn, I jump back to the archway I ran from. My vision returns and I see smoke rising from the outer wall.

I decide there is nothing to do but wait the storm out in the hostel. I return, momentarily broke and identity-less. When the storm finally passes I return to the bank I stopped at, which is closed. That night, some fellow travelers take pity on me and share their pasta.

The next morning I strike out beneath cooler, drier skies. When I make it to the bank I ask if someone found my satchel. They have. The thirty-something French woman keeps telling me, in French, “you should have come back yesterday. Why didn’t you come back? You were scared, weren’t you? Weren’t you?” I couldn’t get her to understand that it wasn’t fear that kept me from the bank, but the fact that it was closed, so I let it drop, thanked her for the satchel and went on to enjoy Carcassonne, a town that I highly recommend, although it is a bit touristy and prone to lightning strikes.

Tornado

Eventually, you just drive. You drive and you drive and you drive. You can go days without speaking to anyone. You just drive.

Two days after leaving Ohio, I find myself somewhere outside the town of Grand Island, Neb. As I head toward Colorado I see the sky darkening to the south. I notice some freeway off-ramps are closed, and as I listen to the radio I hear that the tornado warnings I've been hearing are naming the county I just entered.

Still, the sky seems clear. I pull into a rest stop. As I leave the bathroom I see a thick, heavy cloud on the horizon. The sky is no longer blue or even gray. It is green, as if someone put a stage-light filter over the sun. By the time I pull onto the interstate two minutes later the sky has darkened as if hours passed. The wind has picked up, and drizzle begins to fall. Half a mile later the sky rips open. The rain pours so hard I simply cannot see out the window. I slowly pull over to the shoulder. I am not the only one, as I can see the watery orange glow of taillights carefully inching over.

I reach what I believe is the edge of the road and the car begins to rock in the wind. The rain comes down so hard that I can't tell anything about what is outside my door except that there is nowhere to go and nothing to do but just sit and wait. The rain only gets harder. It pounds.

Suddenly the rain turns to hail. It sounds like baseballs are dropping from giant buckets suspended in the sky. The car shakes with a violence I have not felt since the 1994 Northridge Earthquake.

I sit and I wait for 10 minutes, wondering whether I should run for it or sit it out. But as far as I can tell no one else has left their car.

Besides, I am not frightened. I am fascinated, and I stare in awe out the window until the static of the AM radio becomes audible again. The rain lessens to a simple downpour. Moments later a state trooper crawls past and the cars — there are dozens pulled to the side along with me — fall in line behind him.

Within five minutes the rain ends. Within 10 the last cloud leaves the sky. In 45 I cross the border beneath a clean, brilliant blue sky.

Benin

We trudge down the path and wait outside Aaron's school for a ride to Porto Novo. With thousands of Celestial Christians waiting for rides to Semes, their coastal pilgrimage destination, we thought we would have to wait hours for a zemidjan (or zem, a motorcycle taxi) for the 45-minute ride down the dusty dirt road to the city.

Instead, two men with matching blue, orange and cream outfits, identical sunglasses and flat tops pick us up in a pickup truck.

Luck? Perhaps.

Today the roads are packed with people — some in the white and yellow garb of the Celestials — headed to the beach at Semes. They are piled on any sort of vehicle they can find. Trucks draped with people. Zems are piled with entire families. We see one carrying seven people. By the time we reach Porto Novo the streets and trails are flooded with people headed out for the holiday. In this truck, though, we are the only passengers. The ride comes courtesy of two brothers we met the previous day at a bar in Asowlisse.

They drop us off on the edge of Porto Novo, where we finally squeeze into a taxi. We pass the throngs gathered at Semes and finally make it to Cotonou, where we make a deal with the driver to take us all the way to Grand Popo, another hour away, as long as we can pick up some new passengers to share the price.

The scene as we arrive at the first stop is an assault of energy. People everywhere in every direction doing everything. We stop again for our final passenger at Etoile Rouge, a large monument from the socialist era. It consists of a statue with a worker at the top rising from a broad red star. As we wait, a group of nomad woman — the Fulani — walk by in a line with their loads balanced on their heads.

The ride to Grand Popo is long, crowded and hot. As we pass through one small town a crowd is gathered on the side of the road. We crawl slowly by the crowd and realize there is a Zem on its side. People are attending to somebody on the ground. We get to the scene of the accident and the other passengers let out a gasp. One man crosses himself. On the side of the road lies a woman’s body, her head split open. I grasp the motorcycle helmet in my lap a little more tightly.

We reach Grand Popo at the height of the afternoon in search of nothing but a spot to rest in the shade and, if nothing else, a cold shower. This is a resort town and the day before Christmas, so most of the hotels are closed. We meet Aaron’s friends at Coco Beach, a place run by Rastafarians with thatched beds and a decidedly Gilligan’s Island feel.

Gambling, we walk toward the Auberge, Benin’s version of a luxury resort. We can’t find a zem and continue to walk, our bodies stinking, our backpacks scratching at our exposed skin. Melting as we walk, we finally make it to the Auberge, where we get the last room available.

Christmas Eve dinner is the longest wait of our lives. In Benin, it is wise to ask if restaurants have everything on the menu. But no matter the answer, you’ll find that half the things the waiter says are in stock are not.

It takes an hour just to get a beer. It takes two or three more (and two more beers each) until our dinner arrives. Aaron and I each ordered the grilled pork. When it finally arrives — delivered to the kitchen mere minutes before by motorcycle — the waiter brings machete and the entire, fatty rear leg of a pig.

Famished from our long day, we devour our dinner, certain that the waiter has just gone home and killed a pig.

We end the night outside the auberge, drinking a rare beer on tap and watching dancers and fire eaters as smoke billows over us from a nearby bonfire.

Christmas morning is spent with an omelette, espresso and an ocean breeze. The day is spent on the beach, reading, playing cards drinking wine and watching tiny sand crabs race about.

The next day we head back to Cotonou. Once again we wait, certain it will be difficult to find a ride. Instead, a souped-up black Nissan coupe pulls up next to us. The driver and passenger leap up, grab our bags and usher us into the car.

Five minutes into the trip the driver’s companion reaches up, pulls the visor down and reveals an LCD video screen. Suddenly a music video for the Congolese and Senegalese pop we’re listening to lights up. Moments later, he reaches behind the driver's seat, pulls back some mesh on the head-rest and reveals the same thing. Then, once more, he does the same on the head-rest of his own seat. We ride comfortably. I sit in the middle of the back seat, Jake and Aaron on either side, their helmets in their laps. The windows are down, the breeze fresh except for the exhaust from the truck we are presently passing and we are relaxed, refreshed and headed back to Cotonou for the beginning of the second half of our trip.

But before we arrive we race down the highway, the driver and his friend dancing the entire way. The music videos continue to play as we weave in and out of traffic and nearly dying as the driver plays chicken with a giant dump truck.

Before we depart, our new friends ask for our contact information and try to find out where we will celebrate New Year’s Eve. They are hoping we can find them an American wife. Anyone will do. He doesn’t care how she looks. She doesn’t even need to have legs.