Out of Indo

In 1913 a young Danish woman followed her new husband (who also happened to be her second cousin) to Kenya to establish a coffee plantation. The Baron and Baroness Blixen started life in the Ngong Hills well enough–many a hunting safaris and coffee planting days were had, until Karen Blixen contracted syphilis from the philandering Baron and returned to Denmark to recover.

There have always been aspects of Karen Blixen’s life that I have loved and admired. I like the idea of Ms. Blixen arriving in Kenya not quite understanding what she is entering into, yet embarking anyway. Karen allowed herself to be shaped, and ultimately transformed by Africa itself. Her stories of plantation floods, bankrupt businesses, cultural faux pas, disease and an affair with an intriguing safari guide are the kind of redemption stories and silver linings we readers love.

I reread her memoir (published under her male nom de plume Isak Dinesen) two years ago when I accepted my Peace Corps invitation to Indonesia. At the time, it was the grandness of her experiences abroad that struck me the most. This past month I picked up her book again. This time, the only thing I could think about was the syphilis.

Thinking about syphilis became almost a sickness in itself. I thought about Karen Blixen and syphilis in hospital waiting rooms, on x-ray and examination tables, and propped up in a hotel bed. I had been biking with some of the kids in my neighborhood when a few of us collided over a pot hole and I landed flat on my back. Sustaining four fractured vertebrae while casually biking in my village post giant bike trip to New Zealand is almost too ironic to even mention.

“But at least it’s not syphilis” I told myself as I hunched my way to electro-stimulation therapy in Surabaya. And when Peace Corps informed me they were medically evacuating me to the states I read the words of Karen Blixen with renewed fervor. “God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road” she writes. I hold these words in my head the first day I learn how to walk in my back brace.

Being sent home to heal has been more complex than I thought it would be. The prematurity of my homecoming in itself has left me in a strange position, like a sheepish party guest who has made a great show of saying goodnight to everyone and then finds she must return to retrieve her car keys. I understand now, what Ms. Blixen must have, upon her return to Denmark: the feeling of having left something behind only to realize that what you left behind was your life. To have left my life in Indonesia, which is so beautiful in its complexity and so maddening in its mystery leaves me with a feeling of buzzy muzziness unrelated to cracked bones.

There’s no way to know what makes life go in one direction and not another. I could not have foreseen that the breaking of my back would rebuild and reinvigorate my sense of purpose as a Peace Corps volunteer. As Ms. Blixen notes, “difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.”

It is true. The love and support that has been revealed to me is a gentle reminder of how lucky and enriched my life both here in Colorado and back in Indonesia is. It’s the kind of love that is almost tangible. It makes me feel fierce and humble and gathered up inside. This accident has left me trembling, but glad.

In the end, Karen Blixen is able to take back her life from syphilis, and return to the hills of Africa she loves so much. Later in life, she will write a memoir about her experiences there. In 2015 I will reread “Out of Africa” for the third time and wait and hope for the day in the not so distant future when I too will return to the country I love and cherish so much.