How I did not read Robinson Crusoe in the window seat in Senegal
Laurel here, memorialising a story I have told many times over the years. It was 1998, and I was travelling with a group of six in West Africa for about a month. We were taking a night bus from Senegal to somewhere else. This was not the overnight bus where we were over the moon about finding a coach that was “climatisée” (another story there: it wasn’t). It was one of the regular ones in what looked like a beat-up school-bus, painted lime green. What I most remember is that I’d obtained a window seat. I have always preferred these because (I assumed) it kept you away from most of the nonsense going on in the bus.
To wit: just before the bus took off, dozens of women appeared in their elaborate boubous, carrying the giant plaid shopping bags that are a feature of every African country I’ve been to and most especially Senegal. They began stuffing the bags in through the windows. From here, others, men and women both, grabbed them and shoved them into any available crevice and some other crevices that were not so available, like where we toubab were trying to get comfortable. (Toubab is a word throughout French-speaking West Africa that denotes tourists; it means several different things, none of them terribly positive.)
Also: in West Africa the seats on buses, even when clearly delineated as one-person seats, are advisory rather than regulatory. So in our bench two- or three-person seats, four people were sitting. And anywhere there was not a person was immediately occupied by plaid bags piled on their sides, four high. We were close. It is probably needless to say that the aisles were also filled. I worried, immediately, about how I would go to the bathroom. But it turns out that lavatories were the least of my problems. Not least because the bus didn’t have one anyway.
My travelling companions scattered themselves throughout the bus. (It is every man for himself on most forms of public transportation most places in the world.) Several of them were also in window seats, surrounded by persons with chickens and children on their laps. They all looked to be enduring their own trials; frankly I considered myself grateful to have avoided the poultry. But we all seemed to have succeeded in fending off most of the things handed to us
The two of us who spoke more than three words of Wolof (a common language in Senegal) found out and stage-whispered to the rest of us, that the bags were full of soap, being smuggled across the border. Why I cannot imagine. But smuggling is pretty common in that part of the world and no doubt they had their reasons. Soap is an inoffensive thing to be smuggling in any case and given the closeness alluded to above it was a welcome change from the other smells that are an inevitable part of being on a bus full of people and chickens and god knows what else.
The woman next to me handed me a banana leaf wrapped around some food and I ate it with delight. Mostly sticky rice, with some meat and sauce. (Delicious!) I thanked her, and tried to start a conversation. But we turned out not to have any languages in common (French is the official language of Senegal, but lots of people, especially if they are older, don’t speak much of it.)
We gave up and smiled at each other, and then she closed her eyes. So I turned to my book. I was deeply into Robinson Crusoe at the time – I always travel with a handful of used paperbacks, mostly classics, that I can discard as I finish them. And when I say “deeply,” I mean about thirty pages in, which turns out to be directly relevant to the story at hand. So: we settled ourselves down for a long trip, handed back or tried to hand back the various babies and chickens given to us in the hopes that we would hold them for the entirety. And I snuggled up in my corner with Robinson. It was late afternoon and summer in Senegal, so there was still plenty of light.
About twenty minutes later it began to rain, so I closed my window. Everyone else closed theirs too, with varying degrees of success; some stuck and some appeared closed but leaked nonetheless. A few minutes later, I discovered that mine was one of the leaky ones. As the rain picked up, the water dripped slowly onto, well, me. Trying not to bother my seatmate, I shuffled in my pack to try to find something waterproof. But my raincoat was in the bigger pack that I’d personally strapped to the outside of the bus. Or so I hoped – we had been terrifying each other for weeks with tales of how we’d heard about someone whose bag was taken off the roof after he got on the bus, or how someone else watched theirs roll off the back of the bus and into oncoming traffic.
In any case, my pack had only food and water in it, plus a passport and a hat. I put on the hat, but it wasn’t my head that was getting wet so that didn’t help much. My left side started to get damp and cold, what with the typhoon dripping on it. So, with a brilliant flash of insight, I pulled out the title page of old Robinson, crumpled it up, and stuffed it into the crack. But the title page was no match for what was turning into a torrent running down the inside of the window and onto my shirt and shoulder. No problem; I tore out more pages, feeling clever.
Ordinarily, let’s be clear, I am not a fan of defacing books. But this was a paperback, as I mentioned, that I’d paid maybe three dollars for. And it was from the sixties so the glue binding was already coming apart. So it wasn’t going to last long anyway. In fact, that’s what gave me the idea in the first place; the title page was loose and I’d been worried about it falling out. And nobody else wanted the book. (It is a cardinal rule of travelling with other people that you have to share books.) In any case, I am not normally a disrespecter of the printed word.
The woman next to me seemed excited, not in a bad way, about what I was doing so I decided it was surely a clever thing. She went back to sleep because, hey, she is not soaking wet and we have a long ride ahead of us. The next ninety minutes or so you can imagine for yourself. I am ripping out pages and wedging them in the wet place. They are quickly becoming soaked and literally disintegrating and falling out of the bus, our very own sodden breadcrumbs leading back to Dakar, the capital of Senegal. I am pulling out more pages. Then we are out of the pages I have read.
I am faced with a difficult decision: save poor Robinson, or sacrifice him for my own comfort? It turns out not to be a difficult decision at all. I do a quick count. I have four more books to read plus at least two of other people’s I can count on. There go another dozen pages, into the sopping void. We are very near the end of the story, in both senses. Finally, the rain lets up and I sit, shivering and grasping the last ten pages of Robinson Crusoe. I am not sure whether I want to laugh or cry.
In the way of things in Senegal, though, it all worked out. Within another half an hour it was steaming hot in the bus so I dried off. The woman woke up several hours later and gave me more food. And it turned out, at least from other reports, that I was better off where I was because those chickens were an absolute nightmare. Several months later, back home, I found another copy of Robinson Crusoe and was able to finish reading it. It’s a great book, as a matter of fact, and now I know that he would have approved wholeheartedly.
Note: The fabulous image attached to this post comes from Creative Commons; “Sierra Leone 0016” is by babasteve, and is licensed through CC BY-NC 2.0
