Just came across some old photos....

July of 1982, me and a buddy hiked north across the Afram Plains, an area historically depopulated due to Ashanti slave raids. Seventy miles of roadless bush, then home to a remnant West African elephant population. This was at the top end, a town of 1,000 people who hadn't seen a White man in five years..

Skinny as a frickin' rail due to the food, climate and lifestyle.



Going on forty years later an actual road cuts along that route we took now, prob'ly not for the better

You can tell how educated a person is just by a picture and that guy in the middle looks mighty stupid.

No worries, here I was 13 years later, towards the end of my Motorcycle Stud period

Thanks Birdie, old pictures are always neat. One of my hobbies is taking pictures of people, printing, framing, and giving it to them. After the years go by, they are priceless.

Sir, it was your recent thread on this very topic that inspired me to post these Just found a box of old photos squirreled away in the house.

Here's another, could be ten years to the day from that Africa pic. Me introducing the Kid to shooting, he uses that same little Savage 24c to go shooting with his own kid now

NPD

You've been a nice guy for a long time Birdman.

Cool experiences Birdy

Naah... we do these things for ourselves, furthermore unlike yourself, I have never had occasion to put myself at risk rescuing anyone from foul play.

Check out this one; a group of students I took camping twenty-five frikkin' years ago.... My Ex was into photography at that time, hence the stellar composition, this one looks to me like it coulda come out of a high school movie. Because this is the "Fire, I gotta point out that every one of those kids was well-raised and polite, can't have problem kids on a camping trip.

what a buncha ragamuffins!

Good stuff!

Nice pics and memories Birdwatcher.

I was in that part of the world around the same time. Brazzaville, Congo, 1982-83.

Back then the Congo and Gabon were known to be unpleasant places to be, in Ghana we had a ruined economy and a military coup and all, but Ghana was and prob'ly still is one of the friendlier and most laid back places in Africa, made all the difference.

Only was ever nervous once, that was on that same trip when a poacher coming the other way purposefully unshouldered his single-shot 12 gauge and broke it open like he was gonna load it, all the while looking at us, me and my buddy separated so as to present two targets, nothing was said, nothing came of it, we just continued on our separate ways.

This was from that same hike, a poacher's camp out in the bush we stayed at one night. That is a Greener 12 gauge built on a Martini-Henry action, they used black powder and reloaded brass shells, loaded with a single round lead ball. To hunt they went out at night using carbide lanterns to spotlight game.

Ya, that moody kid in the back really had the Kurt Cobhain thing going on, all the chicks dug him

Mike those are some cool pics for sure. I dont know if you remember me, but i met you at Ed's campout a few years ago. I was the one with all the grandkids. Next time you're on a bike trip and come through Texarkana stop in we always have an extra bed.

Fella on the left won the daily lotto and got the "girlfriend" for the night, eh?

Cool pics!!

As to the Piece Corps itself Birdie, do you think it was, and is worth the time, and money spent?

Is that you on the left?

A childhood friend of mine joined the Bloods in Detroit when we were about 16, he dealt drugs and a host of other schit when they wanted him to start murdering he couldn't do it and the only way out of the Bloods gang is in a casket. My buddy got smart and joined the Peace Corps to get out of the country and escape the mayhem of the Bloods.

I haven't seen him since. The last time I saw him we were 18 and he was 6' 11" and built like a tree trunk.

He made some bad choices with the lure of easy money, hopefully they didn't get him.

I miss that guy he was awesome.

You should probably read your tagline.

That's a fact, but sometimes he's a little to nice, he needs to get riled up a little once in a while.

Are you on the left?

Paul, he could have joined the Marines. Not that the Piece Corps was a mistake for him.

6'11" is not a good height for doing crimes.

Kinda stand out from the crowd and it would make it hard for the Po-po to come up with a lineup.

I hope you friend stayed out of "the thug life".

I'm sure he pick the PC as he could get out of the country right away. The Bloods even to this day have tentacles that reach out all over this nation.

For all i know he's still with the PC.

I'm sure he did, he didn't like it at all , he just got mixed up in some schit he had no idea how to get out of.

The guys on the ends look okay, but the guy in the middle needs a hamburger.

blood in, blood out as they say.

I've heard rumors some of the gangs have tentacles in the Military. Can't say for sure it's true, but I'd find it easier to believe than them having reach into the Peace Corps.

Still, at that height and build, you friend is going to stick out about anywhere!

Cool. Love old pics. Life is always evolving. Odd sometimes, to look at old pics. Always fascinating.

Enjoyed the Pics.......

Ghana is/was a cool place from the late 1950's onward. City or bush, all good. I lived there in the early 1960's and can attest to what BW recounts, and more.

Great thread. I'm ready for more, BW.

Birdy, I assumed from the title, Peace Corps Stud, you were going to show us some pics of your offspring over there...........lol.

+1! And quoting an idiot, no less.

Not exactly, for them this was a special occasion, two Obrunis (White guys) walking in out of the bush, unheard of. So they right away rolled out the red carpet, slaughtered their biggest chicken for us right off. What you're seeing there is them dressed to the nines with what they had with 'em. That was their prize ram, I'm thinking the next guy had that outfit tailored to be buried in, he was pretty far gone from TB, God rest his soul. The guy with the ritual scarring and the shotgun was the real deal, no one I'd wanna get PO'd at me.

Um... see my next pic

Dang it Birdy, hope they didn't all hit you up for child support.

How about this one? 1981, twenty-four years old, in the months after the coup, one hundred-thirty five pounds dripping wet.

I had to travel to the next country over, Togo, to get supplies, meet my Peace Corps buddies, and get very drunk. To do that I had to get down to the coast at Accra, maybe 150 miles.

Walked out to the main road and waited, if it was a taxi or bus you squeezed in and paid. More often than not a local would pick you up and give you a ride for nothing simply because your were an Obruni, we called it Obruni privilege (literally "White Privilege" ).

Sure enough that morning a beat-up old semi truck with tires down to the chords was hauling sacks of produce down to Accra, it squealed and smoked to a halt. I climbed up on top of the sacks on the trailer in back and rode up there in the wind. People along the road would see the Obruni up there and wave, and I would wave back. I felt like the Pope

Sure enough about two hours later the guy had a flat and limped to the lorry park in Nsawam, a town along the way. I was pretty thirsty by that time and stopped in a bar to have some palm wine (AKA n'sa fu AKA the fermented sap of the oil palm), about like beer but with more bugs and vitamins. There was a photography studio by the lorry park. Since the coup you had to get a government permit to leave the country, and for that permit I needed a photograph, my passport wasn't gonna be enough. So, with my palm wine buzz on, I wandered over to get a picture took.

When I took this photo I was quite aware of the fact that this photo was gonna be it, my official living on the Frontier like in the Old West photograph. After this I was never gonna experience another military coup, I was never gonna be getting my water out of an African stream, I was never gonna be eating the exact same food every day, I was never gonna be living in a mud-walled African village, and I was never gonna be that skinny again without trying. All of this and everything else, I was never gonna do again for the rest of my life. This was it, THE portrait, closest I'd ever come to looking like a longhunter, or fur trapper, or Confederate.

In short, I was at the top of my game and knew it. So I when this photo was took I was trying to look like a bada$$ like kids do in Middle School



The driver in the crowded, beat up little Toyota taxi I took after the photo was developed was much, much drunker'n me. I thought we was all gonna die, so was I pretty sober again by the time we got to Accra

April 1st one year I wrote a heartfelt, four page letter to my mom, saying that I'd got a girl in my village pregnant and that while she couldn't read or write or speak English (actually not true, most of 'em have the basics and all the village elementary schools teach in English), so while she couldn't read or write or speak English she was a really nice girl and I was gonna bring her home and try to find a way to make it work. At the end of the letter I wrote in big letters PS. APRIL FOOL!!!!

When I mailed it April 1st I failed to consider the fact that it might not arrive in New York State until June.

My mom never did get through all four pages, she tore it up and started crying She still doesn't think it was very funny, my sister does, she's the one who put the pieces together and finished the letter.

Actually, if I had it to do over? WTF a couple of African kids? Worse things coulda happened.

LMAO!!

Pretty fuggin' funny Birdie.

Hey tks Tex, will do.

Compared to everything else we do, it was cheap PR for America. Most people who get to work with Americans actually like us. The leader of the coup, Flt. Lt. JJ Rawlings actually had Peace Corps teachers in school. Now you can think "so what! a bunch of friggin' Leftist Liberals", not always true even today, and much less so back then.

When the coup was going down New Years '80/'81 I hurried to the lorry park and got one of the very last beat-up old busses out of town. Nobody liked to be stuck in Accra around the Peace Corps office, they would find something for you to do or think you were screwing off. Maybe I made a mistake.

The day of the coup two friends of mine were sitting on the roof of the Peace Corps house where we stayed, listening to the gunfire and explosions and watching the rockets fly. Just when it was getting dark and the streets were deserted a taxi screeches up to the house, lets a guy out, and hurries off. It was an American who had been seriously hurt in a car accident, needed medical attention.

My buddy went out on the street looking for anyone passing by, no one around, streets deserted. Just then a LandRover passes by and stops. It was JJ Rawlings hisself. He asked what the problem was, gets out, moves his firearms around and makes room for the guy in back on the floor. My buddy climbed into the passenger seat and off they went, over to the American Embassy Compound. During that journey my buddy was racking his brains trying to think, here he was in the middle of history, what on earth should he ask the guy?

So, the fact that JJ Rawlings had Peace Corps teachers might have prompted him to help an American in need, in the middle of the coup.

Other than that, I used to hear gossip about the Peace Corps guy before me in my village, who nearly choked to death when the tubes and wiring of a boiled African giant snail got hooked on his epiglottis. So much so that I used to tel them that before the White man came they had nothing to talk about.

It's been a while but they might still talk about me howling at the moon and passing out in the middle of the road

Actually, they probably DO still talk about the White guy who won the big five mile cross-country race, against Africans, that was me. The biggest moment of glory in my life that didn't involve a woman

Pretty cool. They even made a movie about that, didn't they?

"But first, UGU!"

-Gilbert Gottfried

Good stuff Mike! Thanks for the interesting stories and photos!

Thank you Birdie, I can neither think, type, nor think fast enough to post that many words.

Ron?... is that u? ...LA Times ; Ron Jeremy, porn star, charged with sexually assaulting four women

Look at you all young trying to be like Roger and schit........

I thought the Peace Corps was just a cover for CIA operatives.

Son of a gun! Birdie a CIA operative..........That puts a whole new twist on things.

Damn Birdy looks just like Cornel Wilde!!!! You animal!!!!

He could have passed for one of the guys from the band “The Doobie Brothers” 😜

Great read Mike! I always enjoy your stories. Can’t even begin to imagine how you managed it!

Ya, sorta like that, and it was mostly downhill.

What happened was, with absolutely nothing else to do besides drink, I would go distance running most every afternoon in an old pair of Keds I found in the 'Bruni Wawu (Dead White Man) section of the local market.. Due to a lack of protein during a record dry season, this fell off to maybe six miles a day round trip out to the highway and back, all flat. Then, after two years I went home for a month for my brother's wedding and came back for my third year all proteined up, plus this is when Peace Corps started supplying us a box of 18 cans of tuna each month, which I would eat secretly in my room, one every other day (the locals shared everything). I came back a new man and I was ripping off the five miles uphill to the village of Adomfe (which translates to "up here it is nice:) no problem. Five miles up, five miles back, every day, got so I knew every patch of gravel to avoid, every patch of loose dirt.

About a month later they announced there was gonna be a sports day, including a five mile footrace down the mountain from Adomfe. The students asked me if I was gonna run, I said I was thinking about it and they would just break down in peals of laughter, they thought just being African made 'em like Kip Keno or something. Actually they were in great shape from barefoot soccer, but didn't run cross country. Different skills. Here's two of my students from back then to give folks an idea of the nature of the competition, it weren't gonna be a pushover regardless.



Didn't occur to me until just now, but that's why I'm looking off to the left in my own photo, that's what they had you do back then.

So the big morning comes and we all pile into the beat up old Bedford truck that the school had, all the kids are laughing, on the way up the hill the other runners are making jokes. I didn't say anything, I knew exactly how long I had to run, felt like I knew every foot of ground along the way. We all climbed out on the main drag through Adomfe, the Ref is looking at his watch, we were to start at 8am exactly, the sun slanting through the huge silk cotton trees. Somebody had gotten a starter pistol (which may have been the reason for this whole event in the first place ). The other runners are stretching, jumping up and down, doing jumping jacks etc..... I was just pacing a good way off to the back, breathing and concentrating.

"Bang!" off they went, sprinting off down the hill. I was in the zone, in rythm, I knew exactly how hard to pace myself. Caught and passed them one by one over the first two miles, didn't even look at them, I was concentrating. The village of Wankyi (pron."Wenchi") half way down, hundreds of people gathered along the road. Who comes out of the forest first? The White guy, Obruni, by then I couldn't even hear any footfalls behind me. Didn't look, didn't care. Total stunned silence as the Obruni runs past and disappears down the hill, I didn't look at the crowd either.

Two miles later I clear the forest and head out on the loose, gravelly, uphill main drag through my village, 2,000 people lining the road. Stunned silence once again, broken by the occasion expression of astonishment (in Ghana you open your mouth, hold your open hand over it and say "ah...ah" or "shweh... shweh"). I'm pushing the pace now, I know the exact route to take up that stretch, not far to go.

Top of the hill and.... my school!

Three hundred students jumping up and down shouting "Meestar Mike! Meestar Mike!" The home stretch was to run around the soccer pitch, which I do with that joyous, chanting escort. I get on the far side round the top of the pitch, down to the last 100 yards. The first guy behind me has just got to the far end of the pitch.

Cue in "Chariots of Fire" and make everything slow motion. Two of the girls are holding up a string I gotta run through, I throw my arms out wide and I do so

I'm gonna guess that was in October. It was 1982, early in the dry season. I was there, that was me. The prize was a single can of evaporated milk, the sweet milk of victory, I chugalugged it right there, sweetest milk I ever drank......

Pretty much been downhill fer me ever since and now I can't hardly run around the block.

We had two former Marines and a guy who had crewed a Puff the Magic Dragon gunship in Vietnam in my cohort. Pretty sure they weren't operatives tho. What were we gonna report on, the number of lizards crawling across the walls at night?

Ya, people have always mistook me for a hippie. Actually, fourteen years later I seen the extras in the "Braveheart" battle scenes and knew instantly those were my people. Turns out I was right, they filmed those parts in Ireland



Pfffttt... fourteen million Ghanaians were doing it every day, without the backing of the United States of America either. If I got seriously ill, 48 hours later I would be in a hospital in West Germany getting the very best medical care in the world. When they got seriously ill, they just died mostly.

Bah!, I was in better shape in 82 as well!


Thanks Friend!

Which one are you?

Sorta related, I used to tell the people in my village that all White men had two penises, then I would point to my crotch and count "baaku ni mienu" ("one and two") and tell them that was why we was so smart. Of course this was a lie, and I at least thought it was very funny the first time I said it (we was prob'ly sitting around in the shade drinking palm wine, passing the gourd around), but then you know how it is with lies, I just had to stick to the story. No worries, I don't think anyone believed me anyhow.

Not even close, at that time Rog was in the eighth grade and sleeping with Bandidos' Ol' Ladys

When I took this photo I was quite aware of the fact that this photo was gonna be it, my official living on the Frontier like in the Old West photograph. After this I was never gonna experience another military coup, I was never gonna be getting my water out of an African stream, I was never gonna be eating the exact same food every day, I was never gonna be living in a mud-walled African village, and I was never gonna be that skinny again without trying. All of this and everything else, I was never gonna do again for the rest of my life. This was it, THE portrait, closest I'd ever come to looking like a longhunter, or fur trapper, or Confederate.

In short, I was at the top of my game and knew it. So I when this photo was took I was trying to look like a bada$$ like kids do in Middle School








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Dang near the spittin image of Hickok.

LOL! He was giving mustache rides to his teacher in the 6th grade!

Probably not a thief though.

I want to hear more about the goat.

I knew you'd ask about the goat!!

Its a hair sheep, they keep them for the meat. A familiar sound in a village; the rush of air in and out of the trachea right after the throat gets cut.

needs to fill out that stash more.

Seems you have lived a very interesting life. Great stories and pictures! Thanks for taking me along.

he has the t shirts.

Here ya go Rog, past photos from your neck of the woods; Scat Cat and Wharf Cat. I took 'em out twice years ago overnight offshore to the rigs, had to stop, OMG fifteen minutes out and kids would be already laid out with seasickness, eleven hours and forty-five minutes to go. Plus kids with asthma and such wouldn't put that on their permission form for fear they couldn't go, again you'd find out five hours along, seven hours to go



He we are all wiped out coming back in the morning, then kids who had spent about the whole trip puking their guts out and laying incapacitated in the cabin would ask me when they could go again



So we switched over to the day trips, not as hard on the kids (or us ).....

Back to Africa, and the hike.... I used to write letters every week or two to my family back then, long ones, took like two or three days to write. Out of boredom as much as anything else. When I went I wanted to be Joe Peace Corps, out in the boonies, so they smiled and gave me what I requested. I still recall the Peace Corps landrover driving off, leaving me and my bags by the side of a dirt road, like I was being dumped off in the fields Turns out there is NOTHING to do in a small, isolated village, except drink. I figure one-third of humanity might be alcoholics. Women? Anyone with ANYTHING going for 'em at all gets out of the villagesand lives in the towns and cities. All ya got in a village, even a big one of 2,000 like mine was, is the unending drudgery and poverty of subsistence farming, hand labor.

Actually I had wanted to go to the Phillipines or to Thailand for the women, and I would have come prob'ly back married like every other guy who went there, and today I mighta had an overweight Asian wife and a passel of half-Asian kids and grandkids by now. But I don't. Actually the Peace Corps was already going Feminist and Politically Correct forty years ago. I'm pretty sure even if they did have openings in Asia when I was applying I might have got de-selected, precisely because of my interest in the women.

Back then Peace Corps was trying out new methods of screening for the volunteers, what they DIDN'T want was guys going over there and just letching and boozing, or even worse what they didn't want is for people to quit and come home early. During a week-long program in a hotel in Philadelphia everything you said and did was carefully evaluated. Fortunately I was in a control group, the two former marines and former Puff the Magic Dragon Vietnam vet crewwman or course were de-selected on the basis of comments they had made, so they threatened the Peace Corps with legal action and got in after all.

Anyways, back to the hike,,,, here's a map I drew in the letter dated August of '81 I about the trip....

birdy
didn't you move to south texas for the brown wimmen?
just asking.

I did. Tough job, someone hadda do it. At the time I didn't know Roger was taking up the slack.

Cool pic Birdy.
I know we disagree on the R100GSPD, but a place like that, it's hard to beat IMHO.

This was the one I married, OMG all of that and a believing Christian, Conservative, liked guns, slept with me on the floor for two decades, loved camping, loved motorcycles, loved being a mom, went under the knife three times trying to give us children. Her dad was career Air Force and of old school Tejano stock, her Filipino mom witnessed the Bataan Death March as a little girl and spent the war years hiding in the jungle while her own father fought with the guerrillas against the Japanese.

I had no idea a woman like this even existed.



She brung a young son into the marriage. When she got pregnant she had married the father, another dancer. She told me the the second time he came home drunk and hit her she was cooking, she turned around and broke his collar bone with the hot iron skillet, picked up the baby, walked out and refused to take a nickel of child support. All of that and her hair did that all by itself ...



These photos were taken a little over twenty years before the Chicxulub Asteroid struck, wiping out life as we all knew it

I have nothing bad to say about that woman, she gave me my own family, gave me the best years of her life (mine too), At present she is experiencing difficulties.

Also in the present, one of these people has me listed as "Dad" on his phone, the other with her Christmas bicycle spells my name "Grampa" when she texts me, and that's my bicycle on the right..... so it ain't all bad

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Um.... 'cept maybe by a KLR.....

That was the BMWMOA National Rally, 1995, Durango CO.



In the two years and 45,000 miles I put on that bike I also attended the 96' Nationals in Fredericksburg TX.

These rallies weren't "show us your tits" sort of occasions, and women were actually in kinda short supply, but I have never ridden in close company with so many really skilled motorcycle riders

We always go in April, after the kids have had a whole year to raise the funds and we know which ones we want to bring. The very best years we camped out at Goose Island SP. This has gotten progressively more difficult to do because of various legalisms and liability concerns. The District worries about getting sued in case of a mishap and the parks have gotten a lot more crowded, ya gotta reserve way in advance anymore.

Tks, but I was thinking more along the lines of these guys, who somehow got separated from the main bunch and were captured by the Army of the Potomac after Gettysburg, I shoulda grown a beard in Africa when I was still Confederate-skinny....



These guys inspired how I pack my gear to the Alamo, but clearly I gotta lose like fifty pounds before I can even get close to the bada$$ Confederate effect.

Some folks were interested, so I thought I'd inch this thread along a bit. Here's the map, from the hike. Not exactly to scale, but not bad for a hand-drawn map long before Google. Bompata (my village) was three miles off the two-lane sort-of paved main highway. Now this highway looks pretty good on Google, but back then it was a sort of heavily traveled slalom course of random washouts and potholes, driven at high speeds by aging, overloaded vehicles running on bald tires. Highway collisions is the leading cause of death of Peace Corps Volunteers, and the rule was NEVER ride up front with the driver, even though as a White person you would usually be invited.



Twelve miles from the Bompata/highway intersection to Konongo, in which market I would often shop. At that time a Dutch Contractor was building a structure at the Agogo Presbyterian Mission Hospital. One morning I was in Konongo early during the dry season and this guy appears out of the dust on a white Yamaha 500cc dual purpose dirt bike, loping casually along the main drag, scattering the sheep and chickens before him. Easily the coolest motorcycle I have ever seen

Twelve miles to Agogo from Konongo, a twenty miles walk from Agogo to the Eve (pron. "Eweh") village across the Afram (??) River. Usually when going to Agogo I took whatever motorized transport came along via Konongo which IIRC would be a two to three-hour journey. One time I walked direct from Bompata by dead reckoning east to the Agogo Road (paved), a distance of about fifteen miles.It weren't remote by that route or anything, just dirt roads connecting villages two or three miles apart. I did run into some of my students in their home villages.

I could do that walk because it was in the rainy season, and everyone with a corrugated tin roof (common, left over from colonial days) collected rainwater. In the dry season I woulda been SOL; muddy creek water loaded with the schistome flatworm parasite. I already wrote earlier in this thread how during the long dry season of '82/'83 I was obliged to walk up the mountain two miles to Wankyi every evening for water, where providentially a German outfit had earlier that year drilled a borehole well w/ hand pump - safe water . I also posted how I would walk back down the two miles through the forest after dark. A student's family in Wankyi, subsistence farmers, let me bucket-bathe in a room in their compound and would always insist on feeding me. This was long before the sky was littered with space junk, but in those dark skies, while sharing a modest repast with a village family, I would look up and watch a satellite or two crawl across the sky overhead.

So every night until the rains came again I made that after dark hike back down the mountain, no lantern or flashlight, a thing no local would ever do. They stated a fear of witchcraft but prob'ly merely common sense in a place where apex predators had originally abounded and poisonous snakes still did. Moonlit nights, so bright you could read by it, so bright you could see the forest was green. Moonlit night you could hear the all the voices and the recreational drumming coming from my village from two miles away. New moon nights, pitch dark, quiet as a tomb.

Looking back, the biggest hazard to be doing that, along with black cobras and night adders, was the risk of rabid dogs. Not an unusual occurrence. I never did have a problem though.