2018: Daniel takes Cathleen and me to the Haudenosaunee reserve near where he and Wendy live in Hamilton, Ontario—to see a replica of a long house, the sort of home whole clans would have lived in back before Europeans showed up. It’s shaped like a loaf of bread but two stories high and shingled with bark. Inside, it smells of wood smoke and cedar. The guide shows us how to make rope from strips of cedar bark, dipping it in water to soften it. All the roof joists are tied with this rope, as are the wooden bunks. And it’s wonderful to think of so many people—maybe thirty or forty—living together here as a unified group. It’s all the more wonderful because it reminds me of the thatched huts Daniel and I would have visited more than fifty years ago, as children on the other side of the globe. Here, like there, the light comes down in thread-like shafts from cracks in the layered shingles. The pinpricks of light, high in the dark ceiling, are like stars glimmering over a little, intimate world—a world shared by only the guide, Daniel, me, and the two gracious women who have yoked their lives to ours, helping us to no longer feel like strangers in a strange land. This is not my history or my place, but I feel unexpectedly at home.
1997: It’s late May, and Daniel’s wife is wrapping up her semester as a literacy teacher, so she lets him take me into the Canadian Rockies—to Jasper. We stay in a cabin and do several day-hikes. We come upon roaring, snow-fed waterfalls, and we push our way through unmelted snowbanks. We get so far away from everything that we almost step on a ptarmigan that is hiding in the frozen grass, still as a rock, its feathers mottled like snowmelt on granite.
That evening, back at the cabin, we can see what must be a satellite, moving slowly across the darkened sky, star to star. I wonder, Was that satellite over Africa just an hour ago, and did it pass right across the place where we used to live?
We step inside and Daniel prods me to pull out the tin whistle I am learning to play. He asks to hear a tune I am trying to create. And as I whistle, he begins to strum his 12-string guitar, helping me to move through what has been blocking me, finding a new sequence of notes that links one theme to the next. Together, we get lost in the making of this music—pulled into orbit around the same aural planet.
1993: When Dan began signing letters with “Daniel,” I had a hard time adjusting. I don’t know why. After all, I had already made a name switch with him when I rejoined him at boarding school as a tenth grader and found that he was no longer “Danny.”
“Daniel. Daniel. Daniel.” It has taken much repetition. However, I am beginning to let go—to let him be the new person he is becoming. And now I hear a strange echo from a 1970’s song: “Daniel, my brother, you are older than me.” I know what Elton John probably meant. This friendship isn’t the same. However, I too lament each time one of us gets onto a plane and flies away. Sometimes Canada might as well be the moon.
1985: The wedding is in Saskatchewan, and to get there, I have to fly into a Manitoba airport, riding six hours west with two of Dan’s aunts, two elderly women who love my voice and ask me to read out loud for a hundred miles from a book titled A Walk Across America. It means a lot to Dan that I have made this journey, coming up from Kansas to be his best man. The night before the wedding he has me stay with him at the apartment he will share with his bride. We sleep in the only bedroom, with him on the bed and me on an air mattress. When the lights are off, he says, “You know, you have been a great brother, man.” And I say, “That goes both ways.” Then for an hour we murmur about the lives we have led, reminiscing about how it all began in second grade in bunk beds in a dormitory in Addis Ababa. What a jump—from Emperor Selassie and pet pigeons to here, now, in an apartment in Regina, Saskatchewan. So many miles and experiences, and still the two of us find ourselves lying in the same room, murmuring into the darkness. Space travelers in a shared capsule.
1977: When I return to Ethiopia from an extended furlough in the States, my old friend Danny is still at our old school, Bingham Academy, but now he goes by Dan. He has straw-colored hair like before, and lots of freckles. He likes to tell stories. However, now that he is sixteen and has survived a Marxist Revolution, he doesn’t try to sell me on swinging ’round the crossbar or using a hatchet to cut grass thick as his arm.
Dan’s new outlet, it seems, is music. He has all the record albums a missionary kid shouldn’t have, such as Iron Butterfly and the Eagles singing “Hotel California.” He lives with his parents in a bungalow on the school compound, and when he invites me down for a Bible Study, he uses the KISS album Destroyer as a benediction. He arches back and plays an air guitar across his crotch. He shouts “Get up, everyone’s gonna move their feet.”
1971: In Kansas on our extended furlough, I don’t like the cold. I don’t like having to start over. And I’m not happy about the runny-nosed kid from the house behind ours, who is standing on the curb in his orange parka staring as my little brother and I wind up the propeller on a balsa plane I got for Christmas.
I set the plane down, hands stiff in the December air. This neighbor boy is still staring as I release the propeller, hoping the whole contraption won’t flip. When it stays level on its little plastic wheels and gains speed and miraculously rises off the bumpy runway, floating down the middle of our frozen Kansas street, the watching boy pumps his fists and shouts “Dy-no-mite!” He doesn’t invade our space, though. He stays over there on the curb. And because he is being careful about letting this be MY Christmas gift, I go over and ask, “Hey, you wanna turn?”
After that, we do a lot together, that Kansan boy and me. However, at night in bed, sometimes I wonder what Danny is doing back in Ethiopia, and I feel all the more cut off as I realize that he isn’t even in bed like me, because his side of the earth is eight hours ahead. Over there, on that side of the world, he is probably shuffling down to the communal bathroom, taking his turn at a sink with a labeled cup and toothbrush. Through the open window, he can probably smell the eucalyptus smoke of breakfast fires wafting over the school fence, and now perhaps he can hear a rooster crowing.
1967: At Bingham Academy, there is this straw-haired Canadian boy that I like. His name is Danny, and we are both learning to read. In the after-school hours when we don’t want to think about our missing parents, we work our way through a series of blue hardbacks we found next to the practice piano in the main hall, a series with blue faded covers as worn as the thighs of our jeans. This series is titled American Heroes, and when we are in the eucalyptus forest below our dorm, we sometimes become the characters: imagining ourselves as young Andrew Jackson refusing to clean the boots of an enraged British officer or aging Davy Crockett firing from the doomed adobe ramparts of the Alamo.
Danny and I are good at memorizing too, so in the morning we recite our Bible verses sooner than the others then get permission to go out to the swings for the rest of verse hour. As I pump and pump, getting higher, he pumps next to me, talking about his parents’ home in a place called Waliso. I swoop so high that I lift right out of the black rubber seat, almost airborne, and he swoops alongside, white-blond hair streaming back then rising into a bird’s nest. He tells me that the grasses at Waliso are so tall and thick that you have to use a hatchet to cut them down. He tells me that he knows how to thatch a house himself—that he climbed right up the center pole. He also tells me that once, on his own swing set, he managed to fly so high that he went right ’round the cross bar.
I am astounded. What a sensation that would be! To go all the way around, like one of those Apollo astronauts described by our second-grade teacher, who are apparently swooping overhead right now as if riding a yo-yo on the finger of God. What an amazing thing—to go all the way around this huge, huge world then to come right back to where we first began.
Tim Bascom, who directs the Kansas Book Festival, is author of a novel, two collections of essays, and two prize-winning memoirs about years spent in East Africa as a youth: Chameleon Days and Running to the Fire. His essays have won editor’s prizes at the Missouri Review and Florida Review, also being selected for the anthologies Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing. His short fiction has appeared in a handful of journals as well, winning the 2021 Fiction Prize at Briar Cliff Review.