June 19 -30 2001 / Zambia: African Circle Part 2
Total Eclipse in Zimbabwe, and Walking in Zambia
Part 3 - The Back Side of My African Circle
6/26 to Camp Three
new animal seen today:
Giant Eagle Owl
A week from today I will have slept in my own bed for the first time in a month.
This morning just after sunrise we are given a little tour behind the scenes at this camp by its manager, a handsome red-headed woman named Anna. The chef wears a white toque, and his staff line up smartly behind him, in front of their tiny wood-burning stove in the bamboo-fenced kitchen. There are all the pots and pans neatly washed and laid out on a high bamboo shelf. It's a good thing; last night John went out to star-gaze but quickly returned, as Anna had spotted a hyena and two hippos quite near to camp. Not long after we went to bed the hyena came in to camp and wrought a small amount of havoc. It seems too that a honeybadger came in later and raided the oil and some jam.
Then it's time to say goodbye, and we pile into "the Hearse," an enclosed vehicle against the four-hour drive through tsetse-fly land to the next camp.
It's a longish drive but passes quickly, and there are some flies but they aren't too bad. Jason raises the canopy for a bit and at last John and I get to stand, the way we did in East Africa, alone at last. We meet the other Wilderness Travel group, doing the trip in the opposite direction, and the two vehicles stop and chat for a while, John and I valiantly battling the flies in the back. Yak yakkity yak, but finally off we go.
We make our tea, sandwiches and cookies stop in a dry riverbed, where we get to search around a bit for excellent rocks. I find some pottery, some lovely quartz, a possibly-worked bit of stone, some petrified wood, bits of iron ore. Jason finds some beautiful chalcedony, which I name for him and he gives it to me.
There is a certain amount of raucousness in the vehicle as we get nearer this camp, and for a brief time even John joins in, but because the kid--because the kid is not right, it soon gets out of hand and is no longer funny at least to us. The kid's family have banded tightly around him and there really isn't much room for us.
So here we are now at this place, just called Camp 3. We'll be here three nights. We're in tents with no running water, and at first I am dismayed because my bed is a hammock-like cot, but quickly it's set right for me by putting the mattress on the floor, and I am content.
The eclipse is still news around here for the camp manager, a young woman who's been here only a month, after being hired right from London. After hearing her story, John turns to me and says, so there is another way to get to Africa, you can be a bush camp manager. The other woman's story, Anna's, is much the same. I am pleased, and actually thrilled, that John should say this. We have been very, very tight on this trip, against the dreaded “other people”!
I have been wonderfully faithful about writing here each day, after an hour's nap, an hour's time to myself. I am so glad. While I was writing yesterday afternoon a butterfly flew in close, landed on the stylus, then when I held out my hand, landed on it.
We gather somewhat sluggishly for afternoon tea, then our walk, at the best time of the day. Dust rises from the tall grass as we pass through it. We come to a warthog, just ahead and half-hidden in the yellow grass. He freezes at the same time we do. I lift my binoculars and see him there, frozen, listening. He turns and looks, turns away, turns and looks again. Birds do not seem excited by us, we are so quiet. It's a stand-off. We move a bit and off he trots, the warthog, raising his tail high as he goes. The "tea-bearer" behind, the sweep, next to me as I am at the end of the line, gestures to the large mound we are passing. "His nest," he says. And there is a skull, too; as Jason stops for it a great scuffle is heard in the grass and a whole herd of warthog rush off to safety. I had not even known they were there. I am sorry we did not somehow just sit down in the middle of the little path and wait in silence for them to go about their warthog business. I had sort of thought that was the kind of thing we might do. But Jason must guide at the level of the least fit member of the group, and that is the kid, for whom these walks are a great trial.
An impala jawbone is found, a bit later, with strangely flared lower incisors, shaped like trapezoids. Safe at their flight distance, a little herd of impala flow cautiously around us, the line of them undulating like a soft brown porpoise through the middle distance.
We pass across lots of open, burned plain. Plovers rise up and call in alarm at our appearance, but instead of feeling that I am intruding, I feel as if we are just another animal arriving on the scene. The plovers here seem to take the place of killdeer at home, as a bird of open short-grass places.
Jason and the scout, whose name I think is Peter, are tracking down an owl for us, called, excitingly, a Giant Eagle Owl. They trace his call, a deep booming kind of hoo, to a large and very green tree, which makes deep shade beneath. Suddenly two owls fly out, but I do not see them. The two men decide there is either another one, or that one has not gone far. We creep as quietly as possible into the deep shade of the big tree, and there Peter locates the owl, not too high, sitting, happily for us, in a "window" on a big branch. I have a fine view of him. Bob says he is cat-like as he regards us sharply, and I agree. He looks like a big brown and pink cat sitting up there, with remarkable pink eyelids and a rosy cast to his warm brown plumage.
Then we wend our way back to camp. Showers are on offer, but it's with a bucket or something complex like that, and I just wash in the little basin on a stilt affair in front of our tent, in the shadowy dusk. I am really filthy, but I have never cared much about that--at least, up to a point. Actually I am just approaching that point, but we have only a few more days--
6/27 a day out of Camp Three
I am beginning my countdown, though I have not embraced the thought fully yet.
In the night I heard lions, twice, at some distance, and some large disturbance quite near, which Jason suggests was bushbaby catching something.
As usual, I and then John are the first up and out, well before dawn. We have a bit of fire-cooked breakfast and talk a little with Jason and the manager here, whose name is Sally, with a remarkable London accent. I think she and Jason are having it on. Anyhow, I talk a little about trying to figure out what I am gong to do when I grow up, and Sally describes this as Finding the Path, which I like very much. The paths we follow in our daily walks are not human paths, but animal paths. The animals go where they need to. And we just follow them. Instead of taking the trouble to make our own. Maybe there's something in that.
We start our walk this morning by looking at a place where an elephant died, quite a while ago. There is the massive skull, and an even more astonishing scapula, and some vertebrae and ribs. The scapula is the most amazing, because it's just a simply-shaped bone that I am familiar with from my bones at home, only this one is gigantic. I could not even lift the skull, I think.
Jason stops under a tree with I think over a hundred weaver nests hanging from it, the kind with the downward-pointing sort of spout-like entrance. The nests are built, like those of bower birds, to attract a female, so some of them never get used, if no female approves of them. The tree looks like a big Christmas tree with its pendant brown fuzzy ornaments.
We hear the lions in the far distance, the tall grass just ahead is dotted with many tiny birds, and the lingering sharp scents of fire hang in the air. The black burn patterns are strange; they forms arcs and islands and stripes, and tussocks of burned grass, now resprouting, make green polka dots amid all. In the middle of the scrubby woods is a little blufflet, on which is an outwash of ancient water-worn pebbles and petrified wood, from the lake of Gondwana times. Jason finds another piece of worked stone, and I keep it. I have quite a few bits and pieces to carry home with me now, but really except for a very few, they lose their special numen when I get them home. We'll see about these.
In Namibia we learned from Danie that unless there is some economic value to the animals, they will not be protected. Jason disagrees with that. He says that that is not necessary, that it is a moral imperative to protect the animals and their landscapes. But I think I agree with Danie. It SHOULD be a moral imperative, but it isn't. You must start with the economic, and then maybe the moral will come. In my conservation ethics class we came down to the moral imperative as the one single basic reason why the things should be preserved. But that doesn't happen for everybody, in fact it’s quite a luxury, that it should. If you need the stuff to live, why, the hell with morals. And it’s only a few of us, really, who don't need them, or are so far removed from them that we don't realize we need them.
A pair of zebras are watchful in the not-too-far distance. We stop, and they look carefully, but don't run from us. We are, literally, on an even footing with them. I think I'll remember those two zebras, that we shared the landscape with, long after I have forgotten the particulars of the others we have seen in this time in Africa.
We walk awkwardly over a large circle of what looks like plowed-up dirt. Warthogs have done this, looking for food. Then there is a lot of elephant terracing to walk over, but this is even harder than other times, for it is growing with tall grass, and the deep ridges and potholes of elephant footprints are hidden. It's a lot like trying to make our way through the tussock grass forest in the Falkland Islands to see the colony of Black-browed Albatross and Rockhopper Penguins. The tall grass hides all. But here the ground is Loxodontiformed!
I notice how the burned tall grasses look like porcupine quills, with alternating bands of light and dark. I see how they have burned most at the joints, where the little hairs grow. The little hairs must catch fire first, and burn the hottest, and so there is a dark band at each joint. It looks like a forest of quills.
So we walk through the rising heat, dry or burned leaves rustling underfoot, burned grass tussocks crunching, here and there following Peter who has the rifle slung over his shoulder.
Suddenly, with no warning, I am stunned to walk straight into a place of my childhood, a thicket of low curving-over shrubs, making a secret tiny glen, where with my little friend Chloe I used to hide and play at Saturday winter church camp at the farm. I am emotionally felled by the strength of the old memory of this place. I stop and take pictures quickly, tears coming. I have to step out of this magic circle of bushes, this safe place, this rounded little safe place where so long ago I played at being somewhere wonderful. I turn and take a picture of it, to keep, and begin to cry. Oh, why do I cry? For the feeling of endings I am having here, nearing endings, the feeling of circling round now back to Africa from so long ago, a circle closing and me in its center, me leading the line of the circle, making it big yes, but it’s a circle nevertheless, and when it is complete, my life will--will end. Instead of before, when it was a feeling of longing for something that had not yet happened, and then making it happen, now it is a feeling of approaching completion. In that little circle of shrubs, I played as a little girl, with Chloe, who came to Africa with her missionary parents not long after we played there in that cold but safe place, there on the farm on a Saturday winter's morning. I set out from that safe circle in making my own, and I am still drawing it, but I have come round to the back side of it, and here I am in Africa once again.
So we come to the end of our morning's walk, amid a grass forest studded with tiny nests, Bishop birds’ nests, says Jason. I must look that up. But really I do not care, about the name or who makes them, I just want to see them. Worship them, delight in them, delight in this whole creation of wondrous things of which I am a part, though a brief part, still I will have been here, a bit of me will be here when I go. I left a few hairs at my safe circle. I must trust that when I complete my circle of life I will not be afraid to step into the blackness in which I will become something new, though I will not know it.
There is lunch time, after the morning's walk, and at lunch Jason delights me by saying, "I don't believe in natural selection, since that implies an unnatural selection, say, for example, that created by people's hunting of animals.” “ Hunting,” he says, “IS natural selection, since humans are a part of the environment." Of course I am thrilled since this is a view I have always had. Humans do their human thing which involves using their big brains and inventing things and using the things of the earth, and hunting animals or whatever. We are not different from any other animal, we just have different abilities, and among our abilities is that which enables us to lay waste to other species. It's a pity, but it is not "unnatural."
So then it is nap time. I settle down for an hour's sleep in our little tent with all of its small appointments, and listen with pleasure to some raucous laughter from the kitchen area. There are about twenty people taking care of us and all our requirements, and I hope they have a pretty good time doing it.
First thing on our afternoon walk there is an impala skull, with its lovely curving horns. It somehow seems much smaller than it should be. The impala has such a regal presence I had expected its skull, and the elegant horns, to be much bigger. It lies nakedly on open ground, and each of us in turn holds it.
The burned-over trees regrow their leaves here and there, like little clumps of fresh green lettuce along the blackened branches. The landscape is odd, not especially attractive, with scraggly trees and dried leaves on the ground crunching underfoot, and of course the difficult elephant terraces. The elephant terracing is worst when it is overgrown by tall grass so that none of the huge holes can be seen, and one must pick one's way along carefully, not always missing the holes. But the tall grasses, all of the grasses, are beautiful, I love their variety of form and subtle variations in color. So much grass! No wonder there are all these animals, the herbivores and those that feed on them!
We go down along a part of the river bed to look at the shells of some big land snails, and where there are pools of water there are water-striders, scooting smartly about their affairs and etching the surface with sets of concentric circles that spread out in widening intersecting patterns. I suddenly remember long ago, perhaps on our honeymoon at Cliff House in Ogunquit, and John showing me how the waves against the cliffs interacted with each other. Among the earliest of a lifetime of delights from him.
Down the river a bit I look with my binoculars at a dead tree ornamented with weaver nests, and see that it is also spangled with olive-yellow canaries, eighteen of them I count.
Around the fire over drinks and at dinner there is much discussion and we all discover to our relief that we are all ardent Democrats. That doesn't mean I am happy with these folks, but it helps. Jason continues to astound me with his knowledge, convictions, and articulate expression of both. He is a most impressive person. Of course, as I always do when meeting such people, I wonder why he does not have a lady friend, and feel sorry for him that he doesn't. But although I find him attractive and extraordinarily congenial to me in his views and manner, I haven't the faintest interest in him in that special way. Of course, he is the age of my kids--but that has never stopped me in the past.
I leave the dinner table as soon as possible, to get to my snug bed and blissful sleep. There are lions in the night, and, it turns out, leopard. But otherwise the silence is extreme.
6/28 a day out of Camp Three
new animals seen today:
Black-Crowned Night Heron
Green Heron
Reedbuck
The dark morning ibis courses down the pale river before dawn, and Venus is caught in the dead tree by river's edge, and I drink my morning coffee.
So this will be the last long walk, this morning. I do not have the powerful grief over leaving, the prospect of leaving Africa, this time. Because, I think, I am just making my circle, rather than starting it, or wondering if I shall ever start it, or seeing the possibilities of it and wondering if I shall have them, or if I will not. Before there was that terrible dread that wondrousness might pass me by. Instead, I have embraced wonderfulness and brought it to me. I have done well, and so I am not grief-stricken to leave the place where the circle began.
In the rising light, Guinea Fowl, a lot of them, trit at a distance from us as if motorized, converging from all directions into a small flock in a clearing, which rises and flies awkwardly a short distance. They're like large black wind-up toys, most endearing.
Jason lets us stand in long silence with a herd of impala at a medium distance, to watch while they observe us closely, stand with their ears pricked and lovely horns arching, then decide we should be avoided, and flow along the ground in that fluid way they have. A shocking iridescent glossy starling ornaments the foreground, pecking at something on the ground.
There is a place with many small dusty depressions in the ground, and Jason says it's where they take their dust baths. Many handsome feathers of patterned black and white are scattered about, in this Guinea Fowl Communal Baths.
On the river are Black-crowned Night herons and a Green-backed heron, surprisingly since we have these at home, right on the Charles River.
We are going to wade across the river, so we take off our shoes and socks and in we go. The water is cool and nice, up to the knees in a few places, with sand on the bottom and a medium current. On the other side, though, it seems to take forever for all the folks to get their stuff on again, and I am annoyed. I wish I were not with these people! But I guess it could be worse--
By 8:00 the heat is up. We pass by a large strangler fig taking over a leadwood tree in its inexorable and scary way, like a great slow-moving python of some kind.
We pass through a thin mopane woodland, with the butterfly leaves and scraggly forms, and then there is a long stretch of loxodontiform under grass which is rather trying. We see a small rise in the distance, a new sight in this flat place, and head for it for tea.
On the top, we can see in nearly all directions to the open grassland. John finds some reedbuck nearly concealed in some trees in the distance, and we look at them, and have tea and funny little donuts, and rest in the shade. There are rocks, the first rocks we've seen. A nice little skink with a triangular head comes out of my rocks for a minute, but darts back within in an instant.
On the way home, I find a Ground Lily, a stunning small white affair of parts, like a rare star amid the dry. And there is a giant red and black blister beetle amid some flowers, just as I'd seen in Namibia, and some dragonflies at a little springs, red ones and metallic blue ones in a tiny but intense territorial confrontation, and an enormous hammerkop nest up in a tree, "So strong it's said a man could stand on it," says Jason, amending a few seconds later, "a PERSON could stand on it." Because I've been working on him. It's okay, I tell him, a man tends to be heavier than a woman, so in that case your usage is acceptable. I'm happy he heard himself, though. Because he's too intelligent a person not to make this change in his language and thus in his thinking.
We wade back across the river, led by our scout and his gun, and tailed by our "tea-bearer" man, who has carried hot and cold water, cups, sugar and dry milk, and a tin of the donuts with him. I am deeply embarrassed by these kinds of attentions, and just wonder what these men think of us--oh yes, I know we provide them jobs and all of that, but I still find the whole thing a horrible embarrassment, as if it were still Colonial times and the white folks had to be waited on hand and foot and have their tea and their elevenses and sundowners and so forth.
And so back to camp, lunch, nap, and the appointment with the machine here. I can't imagine how this is turning out! But at least I will have done it, and there are the pictures and video.
And, of course, the mind's eye and the memory.
...later, I guess I pretty much decided while I was writing not to go this afternoon. It's only an hour and a half, and it means another hour and a half of hearing the kid's maniaical laughter, hoarsely shouted Tourette-type ejaculations, and childish responses, and the family's therapeutic efforts, etc. and Jason politely and delightfully trying to give the kid a good time. I hope to god they give him an enormous tip.
Anyhow, I decided that my time this afternoon would be better spent just sitting in a chair by the edge of the camp, looking quietly at the river bend and the grasses and the sky and the lowering sun. So that is what I did. I saw a tiny lizard darting partway down my tree-trunk, the Venus-tree, and then stop inexplicably after a foot of travel and stay there, motionless, for the rest of the hour and a half. I saw a small metallic blue-black insect of some kind flitting about in the feathery grasses at the edge of the embankment. I noticed some green grass blades twitching when there was no breeze, and when I looked, there was a damselfly with a body as thin as pencil lead, flitting from blade to blade. Finally he landed on one, bending it, and I saw he seemed to have something white in his jaws. The white thing seemed to get a bit bigger or something, and then there was the unmistakable V of a pair of tiny white wings. The whiteness got smaller and smaller then, and eventually disappeared: a kill, I think, being eaten.
Speaking of which, yesterday we saw our first kill: an ant-lion capturing some hapless beetle and dragging it down into its funnel-lair. Quite exciting.
But for the most part these daily walks have not been very productive. The landscape is not especially interesting, to humans at any rate, or to this human in particular, being so desperately dry and ratty, half-burned, kind of neither one thing nor another. When I would have wanted to stay still sitting down perhaps near a little herd of impala, and just watched in silence until they left, we have not really done that at all. I guess I kind of expected we would--do something like that maybe. But Jason has been very good about stopping and explaining and showing the best things, and his enthusiasm is lovely and touching.
I think I should suggest that, about the chairs, as I did at Chan Chich in Belize. Send guests out with light folding stools, so they could sit comfortably for long periods of time, just watching.
After dinner John goes out with Jason and the young daughter to look at stars. They drive out of camp in the vehicle, and my heart sinks as I hear my dearest comforting elephant drive off. What will I do here all alone? It makes me wonder, and fear.