Spring homecoming after Rift Valley adventures in Ethopia

To have come home for these spring days is as great a joy for us, writes Damien Enright

HOME again, in West Cork. While the sons have flown the nest, our feathered friend, the fledgling heron we saved from certain death six years ago, decidedly hasn’t, and knocks at our windows three times daily begging for food for his offspring.

He is a mess. The beautiful black and white feathers that veiled his breast in the courting season are greasy-black and balding. This is from sitting on chicks. I’d prefer not to think of the state of the nest. The parents fishy regurgitations can’t always hit the mark, nor can all the defecations of the young be accurately disposed of over the nest side.

However, I must admire the pair for guarding their clutch when the rain hammers down and the wind blows a storm. Even as the tree rocks and bends, the nest architecture holds, 20 metres above the forest floor.

“To have come home for these spring days is as great a joy for us as the travelling.

Like most people, we enjoy new places and, having visited many, are persuaded to visit more. Travelling gets one out of doors!

“I cannot rest from travel...” says Tennyson’s aged hero Ulysses in the poem of the same name, my favourite as a boy at school. “I will drink

Life to the lees...”.

In this, I’m with him all the way, a habituated traveller. My father being “in the bank”, I moved homes many times throughout my childhood.

When we travel, my wife and I seem to have the knack of meeting adventures, fortunate or unfortunate. We don’t seek them; they happen.

Three weeks ago, driving down a road lined with shacks and crowded with people in a straggling town in Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, a giant of a man in a worse-for-wear suit, dirty T-shirt and cap, suddenly stood out in front of us. He spotted us, white people, as our car nosed through a gap between walkers, and marched toward us like a colossus from legend, raising his stout stick across his chest, and blocking our path.

The young driver, already down to crawling speed, slowed even more, expecting him to move aside. He did not, but stood firm and, as the bumper touched his knees, threw his huge bulk, slap, onto the bonnet of the car.

The driver continued, but it was clear there was a danger that the man would fall beneath the wheels. Halting, he opened the car window to remonstrate. The monster, in seconds, lumbered around to the open window, and pushed his massive shoulder and arm into the car, grabbing the steering wheel and, face filling the window frame, demanded a sum of money to let us pass.

The driver drove forward, hoping to shake him off as he gathered speed but the man kept his grip and, for fear of damaging him, the driver stopped. He quickly put the car in reverse, and the man, pulled backwards, let go, and walked away into the crowd.

Pausing some 10 metres back, and seeing no sign of the monster, we set off again, thinking the way was clear. Not so. Through the crowd we saw him, his back to us, turn suddenly as if to spring a trap, and advance the stick held high as if to smash the windscreen. The driver braked. The man thumped at the window. The driver reversed.

Pedestrians scattered.

Some distance back, we stopped. There was no policeman in this lawless town, the driver told us, and no diversion, no other way through. Fifty euro, the highwayman demanded, five times that value in that economy.

A truck passed through. Our driver followed. But then, the madman appeared out of the crowd. He advanced, throwing a massive arm over the wing mirror, hanging from it as the car moved. The driver braked: the car was his livelihood: the mirror would cost more than the ransom. The bandit walked again to the front, stick raised, barring the way.

Impasse. We sat, trapped. An onlooker knocked on the drivers window. He would negotiate, he said. Meanwhile, we should, none of us, leave the car. Minutes later, release was negotiated. It cost €10, still a big sum in that economy. We drove on.

Medieval practices still obtain in Ethiopia’s ancient culture, with its countless bible-age churches and monasteries and its teeming, elegant people, dignified even in poverty, literate and considerate in every meeting we had with them, except this one.