* * *
Beyond surprises, the way a foreign reality gets through to you is by wearing you down. It took me a while, in Africa, to escape the feeling that I might as well have been in Florida. But eventually, because of the vastness of the parks of Tanzania and Kenya, and because of the overwhelming quantity of wildlife, I began to see the herds of herbivores as inhabitants of something resembling an intact ecosystem; to mentally place them within a historical continuum at whose earlier end they’d roamed freely all over the continent; and thus to connect, at least a little bit, with their amazingness.
I began to see them. There was the curious largeness of the zebras’ heads, the sturdiness of their haunches as they scrambled up an incline; they looked eminently tameable and rideable, but apparently they’re not, and this struck me as remarkable. The oryx—outstanding animals—had horns so long that they barely needed to turn their heads to scratch beneath their tails. The giraffes were so big that when they ran, as they sometimes did, they seemed to be galloping in slow motion. (This must be how our own movements appear to little birds.) The wildebeests were all about numbers: to see one in the Serengeti was to see a quarter million, and in migration they proceed single file, like an endless coal train in Montana, stretching from horizon to horizon. The hippopotamus is reputedly the most dangerous wild animal in Africa, but, for me, as I watched a large herd wallowing in a pond, blowing water at one another, rolling over to float with their pink bellies and circular soles pointing skyward, they were also the most endearing. For sheer charisma, however, nothing could top the buffalo. Their expressions were as badass as a Navy SEAL’s, and there was a distinctly unbovine gleam of intelligence in their eyes. At Ngorongoro, we saw a giant bull taunting a trio of sleepy lions while the rest of his herd looked on raptly. Glancing over his shoulder, as if to assure himself of his audience, he advanced on the lions until they bestirred themselves, with gestures of annoyance, and found a different place to sleep. The bull then did a victory strut.
Having starred in so many films, the large cats were the hardest mammals to see. When we encountered fourteen lions sleeping in a tree, my main feeling was satisfaction in how ridiculous the biggest female looked, straddling a branch lengthwise, her hind legs dangling awkwardly. It was interesting to see a leopard walk headfirst down a perfectly vertical tree trunk, and to watch a caracal skin a rodent and consume it like a meat popsicle, in two bites. But the best cat moment, because it was the least expected—the rains had been late and heavy, and David had warned us that the grass was too tall to make a sighting likely—was of a female cheetah sitting up near the side of a road. She was gazing intently across the road, and twice, without breaking her gaze, she gave a sweet little bark. David pointed out a distant embankment where two cubs were peering back at her uncertainly, craning their necks. Who can resist the sight of worried cheetah cubs? I couldn’t, for about five minutes. But then, as the cheetah show continued, the mother retrieving her cubs and leading them deeper into the grass, I began to scan the trees for birds.
* * *
The thing about birds is that no matter how well you’ve done your homework, no matter how carefully you’ve studied the expected species, it still feels like a surprise when you encounter one. In the Serengeti, we cruised one stretch of road repeatedly, hoping to find the Gray-crested Helmetshrike, a rare and localized species, to no avail. On our last afternoon, David and Geitan and I went out without the two Toms for one more try. David tried playing a recording of the helmetshrike’s call, and immediately a tight flock of seven of them came swooping over to the road. Their grace and beauty were a welcome but unnecessary bonus. David and I high-fived while Geitan bounced in the driver’s seat, silly with happiness, and pumped his ox-tail flyswatter like a royal scepter, shouting, “We are heroes!”
The large iconic birds of East Africa—the ubiquitous Lilac-breasted Roller, the foppish Secretarybird, the gazelle-dwarfing Kori Bustard—can be enjoyed with the naked eye. Small posses of black-plumaged Ground Hornbills stroll placidly in the grass, surveying the scene with eyes so expressive they seem almost human, and then plunk themselves down to do some preening or maybe just to have a little think. Lappet-faced Vultures, the most massive avian scavengers, are the first to dine on the scraps of carrion gristle that hyenas have left behind; lesser vultures hang back, as if behind the rope outside a nightclub, and wait their turn; tall Marabou Storks stand by impassively, like tuxedoed waiters. Male ostriches doing their courtship display lurch and sway from side to side in a froth of white feathers. Although YouTube has videos of this spectacle, the full scale of it—an eight-foot-tall bird dancing like a very drunk male wedding guest—can be appreciated only in person.
But it was the smaller birds that brought me the deepest into Africa, by helping me forget I was a tourist. Whether a park is part of nature or merely a simulacrum is entirely in the eye of the human beholder. The animals themselves, large and small, are simply taking what they’ve been given and going about their lives as best they can. It’s difficult, however, to admire a herd of elephants in the Serengeti without wondering if they’ve been driven into its confines by the pressure from ivory poachers and cattle farmers. To lose the postmodern context, to shrink your field of view, it helps to train your binoculars on something tiny.
In the breeding season, the male Long-tailed Widowbird grows a wide black tail nearly three times the length of its body—so long that, when it lands on a bush, it has to drape the tail over multiple branches, and when you watch it struggle to get airborne you can see the herculean straining of its wings. The weavers, a marvelous and gaudy family of birds endemic to Africa, hang their intricate spheroidal nests from slender tree branches, sometimes building false entryways to foil predators; to watch a brilliant orange-and-yellow weaver carry a blade of grass to the nest and deftly tuck it in among the other blades is to enter a world whose outer limits aren’t much farther than a stone’s throw away. The Flappet Lark, which gets my vote for the best East African bird name, is very hard to see outside its breeding season, when the male shoots up high into the air and hovers there, beating its wings so hard that it sounds like cards being shuffled. As long as the flapping noise lasts, you feel suspended in the air with it, and the patch of ground to which it then drops is a very specific place, the territory of one Flappet Lark.
You don’t have to vacation in East Africa. You should do whatever you want. But, if you go, one way to make sure you’ve really been there is to bring some good binoculars. The most beautiful and moving thing I saw on my safari was a pair of Hunter’s Cisticolas. As a family, the cisticolas are the drabbest of little beige birds. Many of the species are nearly impossible to tell apart unless you hear them sing; they’re the kind of identification challenge that gives birding a bad name. But the pair I saw—saw well, with binoculars—was perched shoulder to shoulder on an acacia twig, facing in opposite directions, and singing a contrapuntal duet, their beaks open wide. Two melodies and one couple, singing of their coupledom. For a moment, their song and their twig were everything, because they were so small.
THE END OF THE END OF THE EARTH
Two years ago, a lawyer in Indiana sent me a check for $78,000. The money was from my uncle Walt, who had died six months earlier. I hadn’t been expecting any money from Walt, still less counting on it. So I thought I should earmark my inheritance for something special, to honor Walt’s memory.
It happened that my longtime girlfriend, a native Californian, had promised to join me on a big vacation. She’d been feeling grateful to me for understanding why she had to return full-time to Santa Cruz and look after her mother, who was ninety-four and losing her short-term memory. She’d said to me, impulsively, “I will take a trip with you anywhere in the world you’ve always wanted to go.” To this I’d replied, for reasons I’m at a loss to reconstruct, “Antarctica?” Her eyes widened in a way that I should have paid closer attention to. But a promise was a promise.
Hoping to make Antarctica more pala
table to my temperate Californian, I decided to spend Walt’s money on the most deluxe of bookings—a three-week Lindblad National Geographic expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia island, and the Falklands. I paid a deposit, and the Californian and I proceeded to joke, uneasily, when the topic arose, about the nasty cold weather and the heaving South Polar seas to which she’d consented to subject herself. I kept reassuring her that as soon as she saw a penguin she’d be happy she’d made the trip. But when it came time to pay the balance, she asked if we might postpone by a year. Her mother’s situation was unstable, and she was loath to put herself so irretrievably far from home.
By this point, I, too, had developed a vague aversion to the trip, an inability to recall why I’d proposed Antarctica in the first place. The idea of “seeing it before it melts” was dismal and self-canceling: why not just wait for it to melt and cross itself off the list of travel destinations? I was also put off by the seventh continent’s status as a trophy, too remote and expensive for the common tourist to set foot on. It was true that there were extraordinary birds to be seen, not just penguins but oddities like the Snowy Sheathbill and the world’s southernmost-breeding songbird, the South Georgia Pipit. But the number of Antarctic species is fairly small, and I’d already reconciled myself to never seeing every bird species in the world. The best reason I could think of for going to Antarctica was that it was absolutely not the kind of thing the Californian and I did; we’d learned that our ideal getaway lasts three days. I thought that if she and I were at sea for three weeks, with no possibility of escape, we might discover new capacities in ourselves. We would do a thing together that we would then, for the rest of our lives, have done together.
And so I agreed to a year’s postponement. I relocated to Santa Cruz myself. Then the Californian’s mother had a worrisome fall, and the Californian became even more afraid of leaving her alone. Recognizing, finally, that it wasn’t my job to make her life more difficult, I excused her from the trip. Luckily, my brother Tom, the only other person with whom I could imagine sharing a small cabin for three weeks, had just retired and was available to take her place. I changed the booking from a queen-size bed to twin beds, and I ordered insulated rubber boots and an exhaustively illustrated guide to Antarctic wildlife.
Even then, though, as the departure date approached, I couldn’t bring myself to say that I was going to Antarctica. I kept saying, “It appears that I’m going to Antarctica.” Tom reported being excited, but my own sense of unreality, of failure to pleasurably anticipate, grew only stronger. Maybe it was that Antarctica reminded me of death—the ecological death with which global warming is threatening it, or the deadline for seeing it that my own death represented. But I became acutely appreciative of the ordinary rhythm of life with the Californian, the sight of her face in the morning, the sound of the garage door when she returned from her evening visit to her mother. When I packed my suitcase, it was as if I were doing the bidding of the money I’d paid.
* * *
In St. Louis, in August 1976, on an evening cool enough that my parents and I were eating dinner on the porch, my mother got up to answer the phone in the kitchen and immediately summoned my father. “It’s Irma,” she said. Irma was my father’s sister, who lived with Walt in Dover, Delaware. It must have been clear that something terrible had happened, because I remember being in the kitchen, standing near my mother, when my father interrupted whatever Irma was saying to him and shouted into the telephone, as if in anger, “Irma, my God, is she dead?”
Irma and Walt were my godparents, but I didn’t know them well. My mother couldn’t stand Irma—she maintained that Irma had been terminally spoiled by her parents, at my father’s expense—and although Walt was felt to be much the more likable of the two, a retired Air Force colonel who’d become a high-school guidance counselor, I knew him mainly from a self-published volume of golf wisdom that he’d sent us, Eclectic Golf, which, because I read everything, I’d read. The person I’d seen more of was Walt and Irma’s only child, Gail. She was a tall and pretty and adventurous young woman who’d gone to college in Missouri and often stopped to see us. She’d graduated the previous year and had taken a job as a silversmith’s apprentice at Colonial Williamsburg, in Virginia. What Irma was calling to tell us was that Gail, while driving alone, overnight, in heavy rain, to a rock concert in Ohio, had lost control of her car on one of West Virginia’s narrow, winding highways. Although Irma apparently couldn’t bring herself to say the words, Gail was dead.
I was sixteen and understood what death was. And yet, perhaps because my parents didn’t bring me along to the funeral, I didn’t cry or grieve for Gail. What I had, instead, was a feeling that her death was somehow inside my head—as if my network of memories of her had been cauterized by some hideous needle and now constituted a zone of nullity, a zone of essential, bad truth. The zone was too forbidding to enter consciously, but I could sense it there, behind a mental cordon, the irreversibility of my lovely cousin’s death.
A year and a half after the accident, when I was a college freshman in Pennsylvania, my mother conveyed to me an invitation from Irma and Walt to come to Dover for a weekend, along with her own strict instruction that I say yes. In my imagination, the house in Dover was an embodiment of the zone of bad truth in my head. I went there with a dread which the house proceeded to justify. It had the uncluttered, oppressively clean formality of an official residence. The floor-length curtains, their stiffness, the precision of their folds, seemed to say that no breath or movement of Gail’s would ever stir them. My aunt’s hair was pure white and looked as stiff as the curtains. The whiteness of her face was intensified by crimson lipstick and heavy eyeliner.
I learned that only my parents called Irma Irma; to everyone else, she was Fran, a shortening of her maiden name. I’d dreaded a scene of open grief, but Fran filled the minutes and the hours by talking to me incessantly, in a strained and overloud voice. The talk—about her house’s decor, about her acquaintance with Delaware’s governor, about the direction the nation had taken—was exquisitely boring in its remoteness from ordinary feeling. By and by, she spoke of Gail in the same way: the essential nature of Gail’s personality, the quality of Gail’s artistic talents, the high idealism of Gail’s plans for the future. I said very little, as did Walt. My aunt’s droning was unbearable, but I may already have understood that the zone she was inhabiting was itself unbearable, and that talking loftily about nothing, nonstop, was how a person might survive in it; how, indeed, she might enable a visitor to survive in it. Basically, I saw that Fran was adaptively out of her mind. My only respite from her that weekend was the auto tour Walt gave me of Dover and its Air Force base. Walt was a lean, tall man, ethnically Slovenian, with a beak of a nose and hair persisting only behind his ears. His nickname was Baldy.
I visited him and Fran twice more while I was in college, and they came to my graduation and to my wedding, and then, for many years, I had little contact with them beyond birthday cards and my mother’s reporting (always colored by her dislike of Fran) on the dutiful stops that she and my father made in Boynton Beach, Florida, where Fran and Walt had moved into a golf-centered condominium complex. But then, after my father died, and while my mother was losing her battle with cancer, a funny thing happened: Walt became smitten with my mother.
Fran by now was straightforwardly demented, with Alzheimer’s, and had entered a nursing home. Since my father had also had Alzheimer’s, Walt had reached out by telephone to my mother for advice and commiseration. According to her, he’d then traveled by himself to St. Louis, where the two of them, finding themselves alone together for the first time, had uncovered so much common ground—each was an optimistic lover of life, long married to a rigid and depressive Franzen—that they’d fallen into a dizzying kind of ease with each other, an incipiently romantic intimacy. Walt had taken her downtown to her favorite restaurant, and afterward, at the wheel of her car, he’d scraped a fender on the wall of a parking garage; the two of t
hem, giggling, a little bit drunk, had agreed to split the repair cost and tell no one. (Walt did eventually tell me.) Soon after his visit, my mother’s health worsened, and she went to Seattle to spend her remaining days in my brother Tom’s house. But Walt made plans to come and see her and continue what they’d started. Of the feelings they had for each other, his were still forward-looking. Hers were more bittersweet, the sadness of opportunities she knew she’d missed.
It was my mother who opened my eyes to what a gem Walt was, and it was Walt’s dismay and sorrow, after she’d died suddenly, before he could see her again, that opened the door to my friendship with him. He needed someone to know that he’d begun to fall in love with her, the joyous surprise of that, and to appreciate how keenly he therefore felt the loss of her. Because I, too, in the last few years of my mother’s life, had experienced a surprising upsurge of admiration and affection for her, and because I had a lot of time on my hands—I was childless, divorced, underemployed, and now parentless—I became the person Walt could talk to.
During my first visit to him, a few months after my mother died, we did the essential South Florida things: nine holes of golf at his condominium complex, two rubbers of bridge with two friends in their nineties in Delray Beach, and a stop at the nursing home where my aunt dwelled. We found her lying in bed in a tight fetal position. Walt tenderly fed her a dish of ice cream and a dish of pudding. When a nurse came in to change a Band-Aid on her hip, Fran burst into tears, her face contorting like a baby’s, and wailed that it hurt, it hurt, it was horrible, it wasn’t fair.
We left her with the nurse and returned to his apartment. Many of Fran’s formal furnishings had come along from Dover, but now a bachelor scattering of magazines and cereal boxes had loosened their death grip. Walt spoke to me with plain emotion about the loss of Gail and the question of her old belongings. Would I like to have some of her drawings? Would I take the Pentax SLR he’d given her? The drawings had the look of school projects, and I didn’t need a camera, but I sensed that Walt was looking for a way to disencumber himself of things he couldn’t bear to simply donate to Goodwill. I said I’d be very happy to take them.
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