Sunday, 15 February 1987: Getting Stuck at the Tropic of Capricorn

UB Environmental Science computer room, 7:30 PM

We arrived back from our student field trip this afternoon around 3:10.  We would have been here 45 minutes earlier but our driver got the bus stuck on the Tropic of Capricorn where we were having a picnic lunch.  You see, the Tropic of Capricorn is actually a big cable which circles the earth at 23½° south latitude.  The driver drove the bus over the cable and it got hung up in the wheels.  Under orders from President Mesire, the Botswana Defense Force quickly arrived on the scene with a large crane which lifted the bus off the cable.  Seems that the Brazilians on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean were really pissed off because our bus was causing earthquakes over there.  

May 1987:  My 6-year-old friend, Jonathan, holding on to the vertical pipe which shows the exact moment of the southern summer solstice every December.   

 

OK, maybe the problem was not so much the Tropic of Capricorn but the deep sand about 20 feet off the national highway where the driver parked the bus.  He almost got the wheels dug in up to the axles which really could have required the Defense Force or a very large tow truck to come out here with a crane.  We were about 150 km northeast of Gaborone so it would have been a helluva long walk back to campus.  As it was, the students pitched in, shoveling sand from around the wheels and pushing the large orange, white, and black university bus to firmer ground.

Students shovel out the deep sand around the tires of our stuck bus at the Tropic of Capricorn monument north of Gaborone.

The Tropic of Capricorn may not be a cable circling the earth but there actually is a device next to the highway marking its location.  It consists of a hollow, perfectly vertical pipe on a stand.  At approximately 12:10 PM local time on December 21 (the southern summer solstice), the sun is at the apex (top) of the sky and shines directly through the pipe and a round reflection of the sun appears on a metal disk below the pipe.         

Route of our field trip between the university in Gaborone and Selebi Phikwe, the center of Botswana’s copper mining district.  A monument marks the spot where the national highway crosses the Tropic of Capricorn at 23½°S latitude.  

 

In a recent letter, my ex-wife, Genie, asked what keeps me here in Botswana.  The best answer is that I like my job and the laid-back lifestyle at the University of Botswana.  Furthermore, I feel there is nothing I could do in the USA right now that would give my life more meaning by comparison.  How can someone with as much interest in the rest of the world as I have, spend his entire life living in the States?  For me, that would be a tragic waste. 

I feel it’s a priceless experience for me to live in another culture and interact with people of so many different nationalities.  For example, there’s this off-beat South African couple, Hugh and Margot, with whom I blow primo Botswana dagga.  I tie one on with my British accountant friends, Gordon and David, more frequently than my liver would like to admit.  My African and European colleagues in the Environmental Science Department are good-natured and intellectually stimulating.  I enjoy practicing my rusty French with the young teachers at the French club though I don’t know them very well yet.  I have a few U.S. Peace Corps friends, but I don’t see them very often unless they are in Gaborone for trainings, medical appointments, or R&R.  I don’t know very many Batswana, but that will come in time.  So all and all, my social life here is pretty good except for the lack of a girlfriend.  As a result, I spend more time writing to friends back home which probably isn’t a bad thing. 

There is psychological shit in my life but I try to ignore it choosing instead to read a good novel or news magazine, get stoned, go to a movie at the local theater, get together with friends, write, and work.  I have no interest in self-help psychology books or classes anymore.  I try to deal with life by living it rather than analyzing it all the time like I used to do in the late 70s and early 80s.  Maybe spending time in South Africa has enabled me to see that there are far greater problems in the world than my personal issues.  My life is an adventure:  I never know for sure what personal encounter, what story, or what landscape may be lurking around the next corner.  That’s why I’m here in Africa.  That’s why I decided to come here in the first place.  It hasn’t always been an easy journey but it certainly hasn’t disappointed.