by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)
After a week, I’ve gotten so comfortable in Namibia that I’m not worried about driving across the country, walking through town at night, or hiking alone. Concerned emails from home ask if I’m staying safe and locking my hotel room door, tell me to watch out for strangers (which is everyone) and advise me to “be careful in Africa.” I’m beginning to wonder if I’m having a one-person fairy-tale experience and missing something ominous that will teach me a lesson.
It’s understandable, of course, that people are afraid of the unfamiliar. This entire continent is often prejudged or labeled based on events in a few regions. The only way to know the real truth is to pack your bags and see for yourself.
Even I had my moment of doubt before coming. When asked by the country’s tourism office if I felt comfortable driving a rental SUV around by myself, I hesitated.
“I’m a blonde surfer girl from the United States,” I answered. “I won’t blend in. Do you feel comfortable with me driving around alone?”
The immediate, positive response was all I needed to dismiss any doubt. But when I checked in at the rental car agency and was presented with a two-wheel-drive car instead of a four-wheel-drive SUV, I realized that my tire-changing skills were more than rusty. There’s no such thing as an auto service club in Namibia, and obstacles abound—from deep water holes to families of warthogs that seem to wait until the last moment to hurl themselves across lanes of traffic with their skinny tails in the air.
Noticing that the presence of the snake makes me nervous, Solomon asks me why. Surprised by his question, I sputter a little with my response about the mamba’s aggression and venom. I omit telling him that only recently have I gotten a lifelong snake phobia under control. But I still get shivers when I see a photo of a black mamba. Having a live one this close to me is unnerving.
“But right now, he is your friend,” Solomon advised. “Everyone is already your friend: the snake, the elephant, the leopard, the stranger. They are only not your friend if they hurt you.”
I counter his optimism. “It’s hard to overcome irrational fears, especially when potential danger is involved.”
Solomon nods, and points out that we’re two seemingly opposing animals in the world’s wilderness. “But here I am, an African man, talking to you, a blonde California woman, out in the middle of nowhere in Namibia,” he says. “Nobody is here to help if things go badly. And many people think that’s the only way this scenario can end, as if Africa is too dangerous to bother trusting. You’ve trusted Namibia, so you can trust our mamba friend. But that doesn’t mean you do it without caution.”
We enjoy his lunch of barbecued chicken, corn and garlic bread that he’d packed for a break in his six-hour drive. The cooler is packed with frosty bottles of Hansa Urbock, a bockbier that gives a subtle nod to the country’s German settlers. A glance at my car tells us that the mamba is still there, so we each open a beer and toast to friends who don’t bite.
“Back at home,” he says, “if you have car trouble, do you wait for help?”
I remember my father’s lessons in changing tires, back when I was fifteen. “Yes,” I explain, “however the person who comes to help is usually a mechanic who I call. Strangers don’t usually bother, thinking it’s not their responsibility. And we are often too wrapped up in our own lives to think about others.”
Solomon sighs, and silently points at the towering neck and head of a giraffe in the distance. He smiles when he sees my eyes widen—as if I’m five years old.
“If we help each other,” he says. “There is more time for wonder. Like that giraffe. How many have you seen in Namibia so far?”
I reply that I’ve seen perhaps thirty. But every time I spy another animal—no matter if it’s an elephant, leopard, cheetah, honey badger, oryx, jackal, or baboon—it’s as if I’ve seen it for the first time. The excitement never wanes.
“That’s how it should be with everything,” he says, and looks into the distance after the giraffe.
Solomon digs in his pocket and pulls out a photo of his daughter, a four-year-old dressed in a rainbow t-shirt and red shorts, her eyes lit up by her smile. I ask if she’s in school today.
“No,” says Solomon. “She is with her mother this week. We don’t live together anymore, so Beata takes turns with us.”
I stop asking questions, thinking I’ve gotten too personal, but he continues.
“My wife left to be with my best friend shortly after the baby came. I want to understand, especially for Beata, but it’s not always easy,” he says, as he absentmindedly taps his finger on the neck of his beer bottle.
“I’m sorry,” I reply. “When people you trust hurt you, it’s hard to let them remain in your life without worrying about them doing it again.”
I tell him that I lost a friend, someone that I trusted as well, and while we remained in occasional contact, our friendship was not the same. It was far from easy, and at first, I wanted to hurt him back in retaliation. But the experience made me pay more attention to others’ suffering, as if my pain allowed me to see the pain of other people more clearly. And that made my anguish slowly fade.
Solomon smiles, and I recognize Beata’s smile as his. “I feel the same way,” he says. “It has made me sad, but how can I say no to the joy of my daughter, my friends, and this wide world?”
I haven’t looked at my watch this entire time, fascinated with Solomon’s stories. I have no idea if twenty minutes or two hours have passed. Aside from my need to get to my destination before sundown, I’m in no rush. I ask Solomon if I’m keeping him.
“If we don’t make time for friends,” he says as he hands me an orange, “how sad would our lives be?”
We look over to the car for our regular snake check. The mamba is gone. I silently hope it hasn’t crawled into my car’s undercarriage, but don’t want Solomon to know that I still don’t trust the snake completely.
As we pack up his gear, Solomon pulls some ostrich shell beads from a package in his truck, opens my hand, and places them gently in my palm.
“Your friends are more than these,” he says, as he closes my fingers over the beads. “See them everywhere they are, and you will be happy.”
He walks me to my car, and as I drive away, I see him waving. He is an unexpected teacher on my travels—one who has allowed me to see more clearly the things I can leave behind. I choose to believe his happy outlook is more innocence than naïveté.
Far ahead of me on the road, a family of warthogs runs across my path. I begin to think like Solomon.
They are all my friends, so I slow down and drive with caution.
Jill K. Robinson is a freelance writer and photographer. Her work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, AFAR, National Geographic Traveler, American Way, Every Day With Rachael Ray, Robb Report, Coastal Living, and more. At home, she scoots baby garter snakes out of the road to keep them from getting squashed under car tires. Follow her on Twitter @dangerjr.
SARAH COLLEEN COURY
The Vanishing Art of Losing Your Way
Sometimes you really don’t need a map.
Here is what I remember: Heat.
Not the recreational variety, that makes you pull out a lawn chair and pour an iced tea. This was the heat that drives a thousand pinpricks through the skin; that transforms even a light cotton sundress into a cargo of oppression. The kind of heat that sunburns fingernails. This was driving across Oklahoma, the Texas panhandle, and into New Mexico in August, during a heat wave, with no AC.
The gallon of drinking water from Love’s truck stop had warped into a squat, sweating gremlin on the passenger seat, which I glanced at sideways from time to time, uneasy. It was the dead of night and stars were out in force—no longer individual specks, but long seams of light. Even the stars seemed to be recklessly shoveling heat onto the world.
Buddy Holly, my forever traveling companion, belted from the speakers—we were in his homeland now. Armadillo eyes shone from dark roadside weeds, and mayflies saile
d through the high beams, seeking one another with the crazed purposeful passion of a minuscule lifespan. I shunned the homogeneous interstates and kept to back roads, passing small towns situated as though they’d dropped from the sky at random, and deserted dustbowl farms with gabled roofs and black windows like wounds.
My summer internship with U.S. Fish and Wildlife in Oklahoma had just ended. I was twenty-one and bumping alone across the endless southern plains without a plan. Though Michigan was home, I headed west because, on a vagabond’s whim, I had let go of the steering wheel at the four-way stop in Tishomingo. The car had veered slightly west, so I went with it, deciding to put destiny in the hands of a rusty Corsica’s untended alignment.
In the pink light of dawn, I pulled off at Fort Sumner for a break at the grave of Billy the Kid. The cemetery was a sparse and dusty affair and Kid’s grave was inside what looked like an old circus cage. A nearby sign explained: the headstone had gone missing twice—the first time for twenty-six years before it was found again, somewhere in Texas. The grave was scattered with tossed coins. It struck me as a scene that could only be found in the American West—the burial site of an outlaw accused of gunning down numerous people serving double duty as some kind of oddball wishing well.
I pulled the car under a ragged roadside tree and slept a while, but with no forward motion pulling breeze through the windows, the heat was unbearable. I woke with a fresh idea: keep moving slightly west, but also turn mostly north, and out of the desert. The atlas confirmed it could be done: 84 to 64 to 285, and I’d get to see Colorado. My commitment to back roads waned for a moment, and I let Highway 80 catch my eye, streaming across the map like a blue icy river above my chosen route, from southern Wyoming all the way toward northern California—where it was definitely misty and cool; where redwoods cast shadows vast enough to create their own microclimates, elven places full of lichen and toadstools and deep black earth; where my beloved sister lived. I decided to surprise her.
The rest of that day was a blur of Colorado growing greener as I traversed it bottom to top. Everything I passed looked phenomenal: Old West-type clapboard towns, distant paragon mountains, Denver (I hadn’t seen a real city in months). But every time I longed to stop and explore, still the heat kept pushing me on.
At first I didn’t pay much mind to the changing afternoon sky, partly because it was changing slowly, and partly because I was too busy staring into the endless golden grass north of Fort Collins. I’ve always been a fool for a good proper prairie, and this was by far the most vast and achingly beautiful prairie I’d seen. The land unfurled in spare, shaggy elegance, outlining the curves and bones of the underlying geology until it rolled off the ends of the Earth. A meadowlark on a fencepost sang a song like a flute being played underwater, pointing its beak up to heaven and wearing its bright yellow breast with a flourish like the robes of a king. If the wide open freedom of the frontier were to be embodied in one joyful sound, this would be it.
I pulled off and sat on the hood for my bread-and-cheese dinner. Looking across the waves of empty land, the old wire fences which guarded only grass and the occasional stone, the distant specks of white and brown, which must have been wandering cattle, it dawned on me that I was good and lost. It seemed I had been driving far too long on this tiny road to not have passed any signs for Highway 80, any signs for Cheyenne. Was I even in Colorado still, or Wyoming? Perhaps the signs had passed while I was staring at the grass. And hadn’t the road been curving in one long and lazy swoop toward the east? The road I had chosen on the atlas showed no such tendency. Was that even east? To get my bearings, I turned around to look for the sun. And that’s when I saw what the sky had become.
Where recently the sun had winked in and out of a benign-looking collection of plump silver clouds, now loomed a churning chaos of brown, black and purple thunderheads sweeping at breakneck speed in what appeared to be every possible direction—even down. Right toward me, in fact, with my half-eaten sandwich hanging forgotten in my hand. The entire sky seemed to be expanding around me, and yet imploding over itself at the same time, creating a vortex where lightning flashed and radiated outward from the center. The first legitimate wind I’d felt in days—a sudden blast, really, so cold it felt capable of snow—enveloped me, filling my ears with empty white sound. It didn’t smell of sun-warmed grass or cow-trampled scrub like the surrounding landscape, but of frigid water and stone—a clean ancient smell that reminded me of camping trips to Lake Superior. Where had such a wind been born? How far had it traveled to get here, to become this great monstrous thing?
Looking into this sky, I realized I’d never really experienced sky before. It had always been something that stayed there, far above—often quite picturesquely, of course—but always with a definite remoteness to it. An otherness.
This sky didn’t stay up above at all. It was everywhere, coming, swooping down in brooding colors to touch the earth. I was inside it and not beneath it. I felt minuscule: a field mouse, a crouching locust, grain of soil, seed of grass. And yet, I felt like the center of the whole voluptuous, terrifying, gorgeous universe. The random no-hands turns, the driving heat, the irrational route modifications, the obsolete and crumpled atlas, the unmarked hodgepodge of country roads—this is what they wanted me to see. The Sky. For the very first time.
Occasional fat raindrops pelting my face, I walked out onto the prairie and stood in a new kind of happiness, touching at once both the grass and the sky.
Eventually, I kept on driving. I found train tracks and followed alongside them for a while, stopping to photograph every train that went barreling by with the storm clouds behind it. As the light fell, I met an elderly clear-eyed woman walking a white German shepherd. Beads of rainwater gleamed in her short gray hair and dark wool sweater.
“Would you like a lift somewhere?” I half-shouted over a wind that still howled.
“I only call off my walks when it starts turning green,” she said, cheerfully motioning toward the clouds.
She gave me directions. Apparently, I had missed the highway somehow, by a long shot, and was now a good bit northeast of Cheyenne and heading east—almost into Nebraska. Well hell, I thought, might as well roll with it.
I am in my mid-thirties now, and for years I had completely forgotten this late afternoon in Wyoming. But recently, as I was kneading bread dough in the kitchen, my nine-year-old son came in and gave me his best pitch for buying him a smart phone. I wasn’t surprised—quite a few of his classmates already carry them. I, in turn, listed the reasons his dad and I think it needs to wait a few years.
“But Mom,” he said soberly, “this is for my safety.”
Yes, he’s a smart cookie, steering the argument straight to the heart of every mother’s weak spot.
“I need a phone so I can always call you if I’m in danger. And it’ll have GPS, so I’ll never get lost.”
My busy hands froze mid-task, buried deep in the dough. This was a revelation. It had never occurred to me that my son’s generation, and likely all those that follow, will very seldom, if ever, get lost. The implications of this raced through my mind. On the positive side, they will be able to avoid potentially dangerous situations, such as detouring unwittingly through a violent neighborhood in an unfamiliar city. They will avoid the maddening frustration of driving around in circles; of becoming indefinitely waylaid in a tangle of one-way streets that all seem to go the wrong way; of being the jerk who made everybody in the car late by saying “No, I really think it’s that way.”
So why was my first emotional response to this realization a pang of regret, like any parent might feel when informed that his/her child will miss out on some really great chance? Was there really something so fantastic about getting lost?
And then the memories came.
I remembered getting lost as a kid with my mom in the town we had just moved to. How I helped find our way home using landmarks and memory, and how proud and capable it made me feel to work together with her and solv
e the problem.
I remembered driving as a teenager across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with my best friend on a moonless night. We got so lost among conifer-choked dirt roads that we started imagining all the horrific ends we might meet. We told gruesome tales as we passed slumped and forgotten motels, dismal prison complexes, darkened log cabins peeking out from the woods. At last we came to a crossroads with a small wooden sign bearing the name of our destination . . . and an arrow pointing both ways. It was too perfect, and we laughed at the absurdity of it all until our bellies ached. When we finally found civilization, it had never looked so sweet.
I remembered backpacking across Europe with my two sisters, and the countless instances when losing our way meant seeking out and asking a local for directions with the help of a pocket phrase book. I thought about how this had provided the ideal door from which to step out of our comfort zone, to meet new people, to speak their languages; how all across Spain, it had forced me to conquer some of my extreme shyness, since I was the one who had most recently taken high school Spanish. And the times this simple interaction turned into an introduction, an impromptu guided tour, an invitation, a home cooked meal and a place to stay. The very stuff of traveling.
And then I remembered something else: Heat. Buddy Holly. Absolute heat. A treeless plain. A rustling, open grass. An icy wind that smelled of water, stone. The dark and boundless sky that came, and let me hold it.
With GPS in hand we always know just where we are, where we ought to turn next, how to find the fastest, most direct route to practically any place on Earth. Yes, it’s incredible, and in many situations it’s the most important tool we could ask for.
But as a constant traveling companion, I feel it may dull our inner navigational pull, our will to diligently observe, and all the unique problem solving, independence, communication, and cooperation that go into finding our own way. And perhaps most regrettably, it leaves so little room for serendipity, a key ingredient of any good old romantic adventure.