One Man's Torrent
Carlow Nationalist August 2010
The riverbed had been dry as we had eased the jeep down the steep bank, its wheels spinning frantically for grip on the sandy floor. With a flick of the wrist my colleague engaged the four-wheel drive. Instantly, the spinning rubber gripped the loose red sand and fired us up the opposite bank in the manner of a horse shown the whip. To our right, high above the massive orange boulders strewn about the hillside like a pride of enormous lazing lions, a dark, grey water-colour cloud hung low and menacing. "We might get rain," I said wiping the sweat from my forehead. My colleague nodded, glanced up towards the cloud smothering the hilltop and drove on into the Kenyan bush.
Further along the road we passed fat, white cattle; their udders full to bursting, their shoulder-humps flopping from side to side. A group of dark-skinned boys following in their dusty wake, flicking from time to time at the animals waddling rumps with wiry sticks in an effort to halt them straying into the greenness of the surrounding bush. But the cattle had no need to enter the thorns of the bush, the rains had seen to that.
At the crossroads a dozen men sat on makeshift benches in the shade of a mud hut. 'Coca Cola - 50 shillings' had been written in chalk on the hut's wall. The men waved and grinned toothy yellow grins as we passed. In the fields beyond the crossroads women swung their hoes, fighting a constant battle against the weeds which threatened their shoulder-high crop. We could have taken any road out of the village and seen the same thing a hundred times over. Men at crossroads guarding the shade, women in fields guarding the land.
Near the turn-off for Mwambiu we stopped and stretched our legs. Despite the growing clouds scuttling the barrier of hills the thermometer read forty-two. In the highest branch of an acacia tree the dark silhouette of a 'Go Away' bird displayed its long bobbing tail and shouted a warning, "Go Away, Go Away!" he screamed. We took his advice and turned the jeep towards home.
The jeep bucked along the uneven track, past the women in the fields, their hoes still striking the earth in unison. Past the men with the toothy, yellow grins and on towards the dry riverbed. As the jeep slowed and descended the riverbank something caught my eye. At first I thought it was the speedy scurrying of a ground-squirrel as he darted for cover. But the movement was different. The movement was fluid like the undulations of a great brown serpent shuffling towards us. "Quick! Drive!" was all my mouth could manage as the jeep once again flung us up the steep bank. My colleague had reacted without looking, but now on the rise above the river there was time to look.
Somewhere up there in the hills the clouds had been torn asunder; their underbellies rent wide by the jagged peaks spilling their contents on the land below. The drops had gathered one by one, uniting at first into imperceptible trickles between the rocks. In turn these trickles had joined forces with others and found a route they should follow. Their power grew as they neared the valley floor, churning all within their path and all within their grasp. And now, here in the dry riverbed they had gathered like an all-conquering army following the path of least resistance.
The sight of the wall of brown churning water as it engulfed the dryness left us speechless. It was like a movie, something stage-managed; something unreal. But the noise of the charging water was all too real. No single tongue of liquid outpaced the others, no channel raced the swiftness of its rank, it moved as one seething wall, determined and irresistible in its course. We stood transfixed. Unable, or unwilling to speak. The torrent passed where we stood, growing in momentum as it did. The body of the brown snake twisted and coiled, sprang and subsided as it took prisoner of the previously dry earth. Finally when we could speak, we may have uttered words of little consequence, words like "amazing" or "awesome" or other nonsense that rang hollow in the remoteness of the Kenyan bush, or we may have been silent for a long time, I don't recall.
I didn't notice the young boy's arrival on the opposite side of the torrent. He had come silently, saw the waters swirling past and settled down to sit on the dry earth. In his hand he carried a parcel wrapped in newspaper which he lay beside him. I waved to him but his face remained blank.
As the water rose others came and stood beside us. A man carrying a tall stick and a sack of maize. Two youths with a motor cycle. They asked us who we were and where we came from. We asked them about the water, we told them how we had seen its arrival. "It was incredible" we said, "one minute it was dry, the next there was... this." They smiled, examining the jeep's interior. "How long will it last?" we asked foolishly. "Until it's gone," they replied. "Your camera is very big," they said. "The river is very fast," we said. But they were not interested in the river; instead they were transfixed by the two strange white men staring into the waters that flowed from the mountain.
Just then I remembered the words of a writer who once told me, "to always seek the extraordinary in the ordinary and the ordinary in the extraordinary." Standing by the swollen, brown river in the Kenyan bush I knew what she had meant. I had seen the ordinary in the extraordinary and they in turn had seen the extraordinary in the ordinary.