If ships at a distance carry every man's dreams on board,
as Zora Neale Hurston
wrote in Their Eyes Were Watching God, then ships at
proximity carry the
realization or denial of those dreams.
In Alexandra Fuller's third memoir LEAVING BEFORE THE
RAINS COME, the ships
are people, and they carry dreams and so much more:
desires, expectations,
genes, children, disappointments, denials. They run
aground, drift together,
drift apart, and make, sails billowing, for happier
waters. Except that in this
book there are no purely happy waters.
Fuller was born into the bullet bright world of the
Rhodesian wars. Her British
ex-pat farmer parents respond to the uncertainty of
violence and agriculture by
cultivating an absurd eccentricity.
When the Fullers' car, a red Peugeot 403, rusts through
the bottom, her mother
covers the holes with painted bits of cardboard. "'I
wouldn't stand on it if I were
you,'" she cautions Fuller and her sister, "'or you'll
plop right out.'"
Meanwhile, her father insists the family be bathed and
dressed every night for
dinner, to which he brings a pistol and expectation for
lively conversation. If her
parents are boats, they are tin dinghies: intimate, shiny
from afar, and as
pocked with rust in important places as the family car.
They are vital people, but their strange behavior is
alienating, and Fuller craves
more stability.
When she meets Charlie Ross, an American guiding river
tours on the Zambezi,
she feels she has finally met someone who can navigate
between the
Technicolor world of her parents and the dull brown world
of Western routine,
just as he expertly steers his boats among the currents.
They marry and move to Idaho, have children. If Ross is a
boat, he is a canoe:
lithe, capable, sturdy. But not, perhaps, suited to the
high seas. He carries
Fuller's dream of a perfect life on board, and in the end
cannot bear the weight.
Using the trajectory of their marriage as an outline, the
book considers
hereditary sorrow, the interconnectedness of people, our
relationship to the
land, to parents, the American Dream, and so much more in
prose that is as
clear and bright as Grand Teton melt water. Reading BEFORE
THE RAINS COME is
like riffling through the old letters of a dear pen pal,
with all of their lovely, long
distance intimacy.
And that is surely the phrase for it, long distance
intimacy. The people in this
book are painted with precise, vivid strokes but retain
the quality of the
unknowable. When Fuller asks how her parents stayed
married so long, her
father responds that he always gave her mother "loads of
room." Fuller perfectly
captures the experience of trying, sometimes failing, to
bridge that gulf.
She is not a boat but a submarine, able both to ride the
enormous swells of life
and to dive deep to discover their Tectonic origin.
A child of the Rhodesian wars and daughter of two deeply
complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to
pain. But the disintegration of Fuller’s own marriage
leaves
her shattered. Looking to pick up the pieces of her life,
she finally confronts the tough questions about her past,
about the American man she married, and about the family
she
left behind in Africa. A breathtaking achievement,
Leaving Before the Rains Come is a memoir of such
grace and intelligence, filled with such wit and courage,
that it could only have been written by Alexandra Fuller.
Leaving Before the Rains Come begins with the
dreadful first years of the American financial crisis when
Fuller’s delicate balance—between American pragmatism and
African fatalism, the linchpin of her unorthodox
marriage—irrevocably fails. Recalling her unusual
courtship
in Zambia—elephant attacks on the first date, sick with
malaria on the wedding day—Fuller struggles to understand
her younger self as she overcomes her current misfortunes.
Fuller soon realizes what is missing from her life is
something that was always there: the brash and
uncompromising ways of her father, the man who warned his
daughter that "the problem with most people is that they
want to be alive for as long as possible without having
any
idea whatsoever how to live." Fuller’s father—"Tim Fuller
of
No Fixed Abode" as he first introduced himself to his
future
wife—was a man who regretted nothing and wanted less, even
after fighting harder and losing more than most men could
bear.
Leaving Before the Rains Come showcases Fuller at
the
peak of her abilities, threading panoramic vistas with her
deepest revelations as a fully grown woman and mother.
Fuller reveals how, after spending a lifetime fearfully
waiting for someone to show up and save her, she
discovered
that, in the end, we all simply have to save ourselves.
An unforgettable book, Leaving Before the Rains
Come
is a story of sorrow grounded in the tragic grandeur and
rueful joy only to be found in Fuller’s Africa.
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