Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

“Where is Timbuktu?” I’ve posed that question to a good many people over quite a few years, and the most common response — I’d say 95 percent of the time — has been “Timbuktu? Is that a real place?” Even after Islamic jihadists invaded the city in 2012, setting fire to its treasure trove of ancient manuscripts and bouncing Timbuktu night after night onto the evening news, most of the people I’ve queried have had no idea where — or even if — the place actually exists.

Once a center of caravan trade (gold, salt, ivory, slaves) and learning both sacred and secular, it has become through the centuries such a metaphor for “the middle of nowhere” that metaphor has overtaken and supplanted reality. Veiled in sandy layers of fable and mystery, Timbuktu is the farthest of which there is no farther this side of Shangri-la and Mars, it’s our global absolute elsewhere. Is it any wonder then that it was to burn like a danger-scented candle in the daydreams of a romantic such as I?

For most of my life I was content to let Timbuktu glimmer in the recesses of my imagination: after all, few if any of the poets and lyricists who’ve rhapsodized about the moon have actually expressed a desire to board a space shuttle and go up there. In 1991, however, I was practically picked up and swept to Timbuktu by a confluence of esoteric facts and literary ideas, a juncture where, in my mind, the ongoing worldwide disappearance of frogs coincided with and mirrored a simultaneous dwindling of the middle class; amphibious frogs being a living bridge between water and land, between fish and reptiles, and maybe, if the lore of Dogon and Bozo tribes, whose villages lie just to the south of Timbuktu, can be believed, between planet Earth and the stars; much as the middle class, despite its addiction to flaccid jolly ho-ho bourgeois inanities, constitutes a vital bridge between scarcity and abundance, between the pampered lives of the rich and the miserable lives of the poor. One thing every totalitarian state has in common is the absence of a middle class, one thing all of the world’s arid landscapes (whether due to industrial pollution or natural forces) have in common is an absence of frogs.

There are things for which science has no explanation. One such mystery is how the Dogon and Bozo peoples of northwestern Africa were able, with naked eyes, to determine that Sirius is a binary star system, and did so some five hundred years before European astronomers confirmed it with the invention of the telescope. Furthermore, the lensless Dogon went so far as to accurately describe the size, length, and shape of the Sirius sister star’s orbit, which lends a perplexing air of credibility to Dogon cosmology, based as it is on a chronicled visitation from a planet in the Sirius system by a party of amphibious humanoids. (Do I hear the tinkling notes of Twilight Zone ?)

The Dogon experience, inexplicable as it is, seems to dovetail (or frog-leg) intriguingly with the commonly ignored fact that we land-stranded primates are essentially, ultimately (from the primordial soup to the waters of the womb) aquatic, a detail upon which I riff from time to time in the novel that resulted from the aforementioned confluence of weird data and creative ideas; its title, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, referring to the current state of human development as we oh so slowly proceed along our evolutionary path.

I elected to set Frog Pajamas, perhaps my most ambitious book, against a backdrop of the financial markets, a configuration of smoke and mirrors that if deconstructed makes scarcely more sense than a tradition based on a social call by amphibians from outer space. So how does Timbuktu fit into the picture? First, as I’ve said, Timbuktu is so close to Dogon and Bozo territory — which research for my novel demanded I visit — that it would have been unthinkable not to include it in my itinerary. Then there is this comparison, this projection: Timbuktu, once (primarily between in the twelfth through sixteen centuries) a wheeling and dealing center of enormous wealth, is now impoverished, suffering from depopulation, and is gradually being buried beneath the advancing Sahara Desert. One need not be a visionary to conclude that in time Wall Street, too, will be desolate and wasted, victim of a failed system, covered not by sand but by water as a poisoned, overheated ocean steals in to bear us oxygen junkies back to “the cradle we all rocked out of.”

There was one other reason, a bonus enticement, for going to Timbuktu: Alexa and I had been warned — twice — by the U.S. State Department not to go there, almost always a good indication that a destination will prove lively enough to suit the tastes of those who haven’t confused travel with tourism or adventure with shopping.

So where is Timbuktu? Geographically, it’s located in the upper reaches of Mali, a nation in northwestern Africa, that vast continent that Sarah Palin thought was a country. Even today, the town is not particularly easy to get to: were it more readily accessible it wouldn’t be Timbuktu. Alexa and I had to fly first to Paris (not exactly a hardship) and wait a few days (loving every minute of the delay) for an Air France flight to Bamako, the capital of Mali. Paris in the morning, Bamako in the afternoon: talk about culture shock. Bamako’s earth was red and dense, it’s air smoky, humid, and thick; and with its slow-moving jitneys, its sprawl of single-story shacks bursting with produce and cheap goods, the city seemed weighted down beneath a heritage of juju. When we deplaned, we’d had to be cleared by security. The Bamako airport had an X-ray machine, and although it was broken and inoperative, we’d been made to load our bags onto its conveyor belt and run them through anyway. Was that senseless protocol — or was it juju? Who needed X-rays or telescopes? Welcome to Mali.

From our hotel, I booked, by phone, reservations on one of Air Mali’s twice-weekly flights to the city of Gao, a transaction conducted entirely in French, a language I cannot profess to actually speak. (Gao-bound flights, I learned, would land briefly in Mopti or Timbuktu if there happened to be passengers aboard so inclined.) Our plane, Russian built and rather decrepit, flew at an altitude of no more than a thousand feet, which seemed okay because the land beneath us was one giant sandbox, flat except for the occasional dune. The plane’s interior had been painted with a green household enamel, and I mean all of it: the cabin walls, the ceiling, the floor, even the seats; every square inch (I wondered about the instrument panel), green, green, green. It could have been Muammar Gaddafi’s private jet. Our fellow passengers included four or five Tuareg males, each, as is customary among these non-negroid nomads, with a full-length sword in his sash. Swords apparently don’t set off alarms in juju security.

Upon landing in Timbuktu, I saw through our conveniently unpainted window dozens of eager-seeming men (not Taureg but black Malians) lined up against the wire fence that separated the terminal area from the tarmac. I’d been in Mali long enough to know that each and every one of them wished to be hired as our guide, and that we’d be practically pulled limb from limb as they competed in a near frenzy for our business. What I didn’t know was that ten tourists had been killed in Timbuktu in December (it was now February), caught in cross fire between Malian government troops and separatist Tauregs (which would have explained the State Department warning), or that for the next eight days we would be the only Westerners, which is to say the only source of income, in the city.

At any rate, I told Alexa that we’d be wise to choose a particular guide even before we left the tarmac, zero in on one guy and walk straight up to him as if it had been prearranged. She agreed, and surveying the throng, I settled on a twentysomething individual, selecting him because he looked exactly like Magic Johnson: shorter, to be sure, but with the same happy eyes and a grin so wide and so bright it could have turned a night shift in a lead mine into a three-week vacation. Now, as a Seattle Sonics fan I despised the Los Angeles Lakers, but I wanted this Magic look-alike on my team, loyalty be damned, and as it turned out, Pasquale was to serve us splendidly, above and beyond the call of duty.