Shara Sinor
“I don’t remember you,” Jaap says when we meet again.
“It’s okay,” I say.
One day Berrie, too, won’t remember me as his friend. “My world is shrinking,” he says. Both of them have Alzheimer’s, but Jaap’s dementia is far more progressed. Berrie is one of the few people still inside the bubble of Jaap’s familiar world. He climbs into the passenger seat beside Berrie for this week’s “Tuesday Adventure:” driving through the dry Swakop riverbed in Berrie’s 4×4 truck.
Starting from open flat, featureless plains along the edge of the ancient Namib Desert, we leave the paved highway, then the dirt road, then the tire tracks, and drive straight down the riverbank to the sandy bed, right into the maw of a secret. The earth cracks open where the rivers were once mighty and perennial; their weight and current carved channels unsuspected from the highway. Gathering tributaries as it nears the sea, the river spreads up to 100 feet wide, marking the southern tip of the Skeleton Coast. We stop for a picnic lunch, where the truck is dwarfed by the width of the riverbed. Jaap is startled to see a girl clamber out of the backseat — I have been quiet, he’d forgotten about me. He decides immediately I’m friend, not foe. “Come!” He points to thorn tree roots resembling octopus arms in the sand. “They’re probing for water!” Our picnic chairs look more like toys beneath the 50-foot tall tree – dangerous with thorns, benevolent with shade.
Berrie opens a bottle of wine. Jaap looks pleased. His overbearing wife would disapprove. “He has an irreversible, terminal disease,” Berrie shrugs. “Why shouldn’t he enjoy a glass of wine?”
The geology flanking the ancient Swakop River is fantastical, opening the Book of Time – stories of ancient seas, volcanoes, wind and sediment, violent heaving and pitching. The land remembers itself. Ribbons of different colors snake along the rock cliffs — some straight and level, some pitched nearly 90 degrees, some gently curved, some swirled. “There’s a face in that rock, do you see it?” Jaap smiles. “It just winked at me!”
Water reaches all the way to the Atlantic from Namibia’s central highlands once or twice in a decade. “A big ostrich farm used to be on the banks. A flood wiped it out,” Berrie tells me. “Yah,” Jaap confirms. “That’s when ostriches evolved to swim.” Grateful that Alzheimer’s hasn’t stolen his dry humor, I reply deadpan, “Cool.” Heading back toward home, we pass grazing zebras and leaping klipspringers scaling craggy, vertical rock faces with their penny-sized rubbery hooves.On parting, Jaap says to me, “I won’t remember you.”
“It’s okay.” I hug him anyway. I expect he might not reciprocate since my identity is ephemeral to him like the Swakop, but I receive a fierce bear hug. I understand now that melancholy lining his voice isn’t an apology, it’s for his own loss. In the end, dementia will also render his personal identity ephemeral even to himself. My name and face are as anonymous as the one in the rock, but irrelevant – inside that hug I am wine, I am sunshine, a breath of the wild he doesn’t want to exhale.
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Shara Sinor lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and has been writing creative and narrative nonfiction since about 2005. Her essays have been published in numerous literary journals, have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, recognized in the Best American Essays anthology, and placed in several writing competitions. She’s also a photographer and maintains a narrative travel blog.