From Riches to Rags: An African Odyssey, Part XI / Grease, Grit and the Gospel According to Kalli.

“Kalli!” I burst into his hangar like a deranged landlady who just found out you’ve been keeping goats in the kitchen. “Kalli, I need your help!” He emerged from beneath an oily engine block, his arms elbow-deep in mechanical grease, giving me the same exhausted expression you’d give a toddler who just ran in crying that he’d set the house cat on fire—again.

“What did you break this time?” he sighed, already bracing for impact.

Then his eyes scanned the room—more out of muscle memory than concern—and landed on my Super Cub, sitting smugly in one corner of the hangar, pristine and polished like it was about to walk the red carpet and thank its propeller for believing in it. Not a bolt out of place, not a scratch to be seen. It practically glowed, like it had never known adversity, tragedy, or the sensation of plowing sideways through a meadow.

This, of course, stood in spectacular contrast to just a few weeks earlier, when the very same plane had been strewn across the hangar floor like a Home Depot had violently sneezed.

Kalli turned back to me slowly, eyebrows rising, the way you look at a man who once burned his kitchen down making pan cakes and is now requesting matches.

“What’s wrong? Need more yellow aviation tape?” he deadpanned.

I ignored his sarcasm and bounced on the balls of my feet with the twitchy enthusiasm of a Jack Russell on double espresso.

“I think I have to fly the Cub to Africa myself. Enrico’s out. What do you think? Can I do that?”

Kalli stared at me. No blinking. Possibly dissociating.

“I asked Nicole to come,” I added helpfully, as if this would somehow strengthen my case. “But she said no. Can’t imagine why—we’ve already flown, like, fifteen hours together over the potato fields! That’s practically international experience, right?”

What I didn’t mention—purely because it had slipped my mind in the throes of heroic fantasy—was that those fifteen hours were the only flying hours I’d accumulated since my pilot training. All of them spent circling lazy loops above German farmland while practicing landings until the local cows began flinching every time they heard an engine.

Also conveniently left out: when I crashed the plane a few days earlier, Nicole hadn’t been onboard—purely by luck and perhaps divine intervention. But surely that was a minor detail. I shrugged, brimming with delusion.

“Anyway, how hard can it be? I mean, it’s basically just a very long cross-country with… well, some sand. And camels. And airstrips made of corrugated karma. But come on—it’s mostly straight lines on the map!”

Kalli still stared at me like I’d just offered to launch myself into orbit using an ironing board and a leaf blower.

“Let me get this straight,” he finally said, very slowly, like he was talking to someone holding a grenade with the pin halfway out. “You seriously think you can fly that”—he gestured toward  my plane—“across 5,000 miles of European airspace, over the Alps, across the Mediterranean, through North Africa where anti-aircraft guns are still considered a romantic gesture, and onward through deserts, sketchy fuel stations, and airfields that double as camel crossings—all the way to Kenya?”

I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “…Yes? Why not?”

He looked at me a moment longer, then muttered something under his breath that might’ve been a prayer or just a mechanical curse, and went back to the engine, clearly deciding that whatever was broken down there was less horrifying than the situation standing upright in front of him.

An opening excerpt from this chapter remains available here.
The full manuscript is currently reserved for submission and publication.

Marcel Romdane,
—signing off while roasting marshmallows of madness over the roaring bonfire of a midlife crisis wrapped in aviation fuel and wrapped tighter in denial than a customs-sealed corpse.