O P I N I O N

TINY WHITE BOX

By Keith Howard

I’m writing this from Windhoek, Namibia, a country that feels like it barely exists, clinging to the southern tip of Africa like a bad habit. If you asked my old classmates, or most of my teachers, why I’m here, they’d guess I’m running—on the lam for something political or drug-related. Because that’s what they expected, right? Class Revolutionary. The kid who made rebellion his after-school activity, with a taste for chemical freedom that sprouted as pathetically as the mustache I was trying to grow. But sorry to disappoint the folks with “fugitive” on their Keith Howard bingo cards. There’s no big payoff here. The house wins again.

So why Namibia? I could say I came for the waters, like Bogart in Casablanca. And just like him, I was hilariously, tragically wrong. Namibia is a wasteland. A beautiful, sun-scorched, endless wasteland. The Kalahari. The Namibe. Deserts that go on and on until you forget what anything else looks like. Namibe’s special, though. It’s where the desert doesn’t end. It just keeps going, right into the ocean, like a giant, desolate beach. And then there’s Etosha National Park, where the Big Five roam—lions, leopards, elephants. So, I wanted  a front-row seat to something desolate and something wild. What a powerful cocktail

But that’s only half of it. The other, more important, reason I’m here is Rob(in the Boy Wonder). (I know that nickname is too clever by half, so I won’t use it again. Feel free to insert it in subsequent references.) For the next month, we’re traveling through Namibia together. Rob and I, we’ve known each other for five years, through all sorts of roles. He was my coworker at the now-dead 1269 warming station, my subordinate at Hope, the guy who kept me from losing it when our friend Raul died, my spiritual wingman. Rob’s deep. Like, black-hole deep. A mystic, a comedian, but still sitting on a mountain of untapped potential. He’s in his mid-thirties, and he could do anything, but he hasn’t found a way to dynamize his potential, to which Bill Parcells said, “Potential just means you haven’t done anything yet.”

In conversation at a marketplace yesterday, while I was talking with a vendor about the role of elephant dung in the life cycle of the Makalani palm tree, Rob made passing reference to me as a mentor. That is way too fancy a word for anything I’m capable of. Instead, I am more of a doula, helping Rob give birth to some of that greatness he’s carrying in him.

We’re not tourists. We’re pilgrims, just two guys in a Toyota 4X4 with a rooftop tent, no plan, no itinerary, just the open road and whatever comes. I can’t teach Rob how to be a good tourist because I’m not one. I’m a good visitor, but a terrible tourist. In 65 years of stumbling around this planet, I’ve only taken one guided tour. And that tour led to a murder. Not the kind with blood. I didn’t kill a person, not even an animal. I killed a place. I killed a dream. A place I’d wanted to see since I was a kid when I first heard about this ring of stones out in the British countryside.

Eight years ago, I stepped off a tour bus outside London, shuffled along with a bunch of other tourists, and I killed Stonehenge. Took this ancient, mystical place and turned it into a checkmark on a bucket list. A photo op. A souvenir shop. The magic was gone, dead, buried under all those cheap T-shirts and postcards. Stonehenge died, and I swore I’d never kill again. Never turn a dream into something you can just tick off a list.

And I haven’t.

I can’t resurrect my Stonehenge, can’t do a thing to make it sparkle and glow for me, but I can maybe, just maybe, help Rob prevent stillborn potential.

You can reach Keith Howard at keith.howard@gmail.com