I’ve always loved alleyways. The narrow passages on the deserted sides of buildings, which sometimes turn out to be blind and other times break open new vision as upon entering a clearing in the middle of a forest. Some of my first memories take place in the alleyway behind a house in NE Minneapolis. Crossing the alley was the quickest way (perhaps the only way) to the other neighborhood children. There were some frogs in boxes I think, and an electric dryer that ran even when the door remained open. If you braced against the sides just right, and didn’t weigh too much, you could do a complete spin. One afternoon a friend and I buried a shoe of mine in the dirt piles of a lot site under construction off the alley. I think it was a game. He would bury my shoe someplace in the lot and then I would look for it. I couldn’t find it and then he forgot where it was buried. In my memory the whole neighborhood came out with shovels and prodded the earth hoping to find the buried treasure of my old sneaker. I don’t think we ever found it.

In my twenties I spent a lot of time in cities exploring the alleys between larger buildings. My favorite nighttime activity was to look for ways to get onto the tops of those buildings. Friends and I would link together fire escapes, window ledges, drainpipes, tight full body squeezes, and desperate mantels up and over the lip to gain the wide vistas that the heights would suddenly reveal. Then we could sit up there for hours unobserved, even as we surveyed all that went on around us. Not many people look up from where they are placing their feet.

The backside of New Amsterdam, really the whole city, the whole country, is a network of alleys. Some are in grid form with roads in various stages of pavement, others dirt footpaths, and occasionally stone rutted wider lanes where the bicycle bounces enough to jar the teeth and make you feel like walking even when the sun beats down hot. Other alleys are lined by thick bush on both sides and only as wide as your outstretched arms. Or again the rivers, blind green walls on the sides, brown pathways forward and back. The question for me is what might be around the bend. What happens when the lane peters out, or the pavement ends, or the bush walls off and must be parted by hand. When will the moment come when the world opens out again and overwhelms with it’s renewed limitless expanse. And who lives there, because somebody always lives in the place, where I am simply passing through.

Most concretely my alley wandering has been concentrated in the backside of New Amsterdam. I get occasional glimpse of other areas of the country, but I travel daily on the grid, which starts with the main road and extends backwards till it ends in bush. Generally the roads are better paved the closer you go to the main road, but actually some roads farther back are in better shape as they get less traffic. The ways between the main parallel roads come in a much wider range of form and there are three large canals to deal with, sometimes there are bridges built for cars, sometimes you must be very gentle while crossing a few old rotting planks spanning the water. There are only sporadic spots where any way is completely free from obstacle, but after six months of riding them in the day and night I’ve gotten a pretty good feel for where to be at any point on the ride. Sometimes that means threading a rise between multiple potholes, other times leaving the road entirely for the grass detour, still again leaving your side of the road to make it past the junked out car which is squarely in the street and has been for eternity. Often all this takes place while cars honk their priority and trucks don’t slow down even when the street is lined with school children. My favorite road by far is the farthest road from the Main Street. It is dirt and the placement of the potholes varies with the rainfall. When it is dry, a hard track is beaten down by bare feet and bicycle tires. It remains visible even in the dark of night, if you give up all sense of sight and don’t so much pedal as float. In the light of the new risen moon it is a thing of beauty, in the breezeless afternoon glare of sun it relaxes frayed nerves, and in the blind dark of a star filled galaxy of night there are few places I’d rather be. The people along the route have gotten used to the white man appearing without a light in their midst and if I stopped to chat with everyone it would be a long time before I got where I was supposedly going.

I try to vary my route in an attempt to see every back alley and so that I remain slightly unpredictable. And there are many connecting side roads, which I have yet to go down. One day I pedaled down a street, which zigged right and then left, strangely deviating from the usual straightness of the connections. Then it ended at a house and all ways forward looked closed. But there was a little side road that went for twenty feet or so and I pushed the bike past that ending onto a sliver of a trail in the chest high grass. Boards spanned low spots of muddied flood. A little girl not out of nappies walked behind me and could not understand my questions. Did the way forward lead back to the road and across the back dam or did it end in a blind spot amidst the burn piles and the gray wooden back lot fences. Was I already on someone else’s land? Should I turn around? The little girl kept pointing a way forward. I followed, but she turned off at a gate smiling. She had shown me the way home. I kept going by feel through the now encroaching grass and it eventually did come out to another side connector and a small wooden bridge let me cross the last deep channel. I was happy to have found my way down the previously unexplored pathway to my destination. I smiled at seeing people again, smiled at the man who held a long cudgel stick in one hand, leaning on it as a staff. Then noticed that the other hand dragged a young girl behind him, wrist bound in his grip, the fingers of her hand blue from the force.
“Ah man you found her hey” another man passing by broke the days stillness.
“Been searching for two days now”
“Don’t let her run off again.”
“She ain’t getting nowhere anymore.”

The girl (daughter? wife?) followed like a stubborn burro dragging against its minding boy, except the boy was bigger than her and there was no choice but to walk forward. That or be urged on by the ever ready cudgel. I tried to breath by remembering the quiet of the grass walled alley just explored, the smile of the little child in nappies.

Everyday normality and I just keep on riding by, even saying hello as I go. The varieties of the story line are so many and I am unable to comprehend even a quarter of the possibilities. How do I get involved? Should I get involved? Silly question white man. Keep riding, other alleyways will open up to other stories. Keep making eye contact, smiling. Sometimes it matters.

We’ve been in Guyana for a little over half a year: have spent over half of the time we shall spend here. The days to our departure tick off in front of us. Things are spinning fast as we get more involved with the people around us. When I started this piece January was still being shaped and February was just a notion in the mind. Trips have been made up a river and numerous times into Georgetown. Tours of schools, church for worship and meeting, football matches, library clubs. Now it is March. You can’t tell by the weather. Besides the minute difference in when the sun comes up and goes down, the days are either marked by increasing rainfall or increasing sunshine, usually a little bit of both. Each day is remarkably like the next. It is perhaps the most foreign thing to me about living here. No way to count the passing of time. Or no way I’ve been schooled in. The world doesn’t shut down, fall off, get buried in snow and then come back to life from under the piles. I feel time most specifically in terms of weeks. Generally we start to understand what might happen in a given week by Sunday afternoon, the next week’s events only revealed truly the next Sunday afternoon. Talk of two Tuesdays from now is met with an indifference, and rightly so- who knows what will happen two Tuesdays from now.

Similarly the past is slippery. If I haven’t been around to play football or visit the market, or say hi to a friend for a week, invariably I get greeted with “ Man you been scarce ain’t been seeing you around for long time. I thought you had gone back.” And there is that truth again. I am going back, leaving the country. Even when they are treading down new alleys in the grid, my feet are not so firmly planted on the ground of Guyana as they were even one month ago.

So maybe I will count in weeks. We have roughly 22 weeks to live daily in Guyana. Well it’s a good number at least. Doesn’t do much for my sense of time, but it's always been an interesting number to me. Two added to two equals four; two multiplied by two also equals four. The number here serving to remind me that time forward is ineffectively measured.

Got to run. This afternoon I pedal to Braks on the back road, the winds are blowing and I will be heading into them. We are heading to a school in Canje to do another performance, we have one every day this week. Tonight there is a community development meeting, which Braks has asked me to attend which might start the process of getting some grant money from a European Union source. The veterans football squad practices tonight as well, luckily my knee is stiff from last nights game and I may be able to beg off running today, we have a full field game under the lights on Friday night and a road game up the Corentene on Sunday. Thursday and Saturday will see me in Tutorial in the morning and at the University in the afternoons, probably should go to the market somewhere in there so that we can continue to make the fresh fruit juices with our new blender. And I have to remember to get water in the morning. Last week is a long time ago, the idea of August uncalculatable. Today has been pretty interesting so far.