twin lakes

There’s a cluster of mountain-rimmed craters just outside Mbanguam, Cameroon. In their center twin volcanic lakes lie calm – halves of a coconut with peacock-blue milk still unspilled. Their cliff-shells are cracked wide open to the low-hanging sky from which mist sheets of clouds cascade to drape the water, kiss the trees and brush, wet the ground. Zebu cattle roll in file across the vibrant landscape, smooth and slow like locomotives, seeking water at the wells that dot the valley.

How can water tables lie so high? And yet they do.

Water fills both craters. Water – element far beyond legendary. Water changes form and shape, can be solid, liquid, or vapor, takes on energy and gives it up, alters light and sound refraction. Water lacks only flesh to achieve reincarnation – drifts in sheets of mist leaving the lake, comes back in pouring rain. What is the probability that of all the water molecules lapping on the twin lake shores, at least one has been here before? With all the water in the world, the answer is most likely zero.  But I can’t shake the feeling that somehow these waters are another kind – somehow exempt from nature’s cycles, somehow tethered here by bonds transcending sigma, pi, and valence shell.  No wonder the tribespeople worship here. 

What if these are the same rains that once chilled, hardened lava all across this valley – nature’s fire brigade, extinguishing volcanic rage in days almost forgotten, days the elders sing to children in the village out beyond the crater walls from which the chief and elders find their way at midnight during times of great calamity?

What if these are the same calm mirrors from which the griot rises at midnight in a swirl of currents that drown the moon's reflection, thunders round the carcass of the sacrificial goat whose blood woke up the water spirit, sweeps against the shore to parlay with the rulers of the morals who seek salvation from the mayajo?

What if  these eddies hold power beyond the tendrils of deep curses, village voodoo, and sorcery that binds the rainclouds or brings blight upon the maize crops clinging to the outer slopes or shuts up wombs and smites small children so their spirits flee their bodies even from their mothers’ arms?

What if these ripples are the same ripples that accepted from centuries of elders’ calloused hands coins of payment, swallowed tokens of reliance on the goodwill of the water god? What if they've always watched each chieftain’s delegation find the hidden path up from the sacred shore and back across the mountain rim to melt away back to the rhythm of their families stirring in their homes at dawn, of centuries of farmers trudging out to tend their crops, to zebu cattle seeking wells and clouds embracing earth and sky?

In the middle of the craters, the unspeaking twin lakes lie.

photocredit Chelsea Dost