by Boyd Varty
Dad delivered this pitch for madmen with pure vigor and absolute passion. He eventually secured the funding, most particularly from Mark Getty, a grandson of J. Paul Getty, who managed to get the rest of his family on board.
Mom and Dad began working insane hours. Dad traveled to Phinda so often that we barely saw him. He’d be dashing about, overseeing great crews removing fencing, debris, and old rusty farm equipment; working the phones to secure funding; reintroducing elephants; fixing the ecology of the land; driving into the community to calm down a tribal chief before the enraged Zulus could protest. Even when Bron and I were with them on weekends, Mom and Dad were totally consumed by CC Africa business, and Dad often had to leave to oversee the recapture of escaped elephants, handle a construction snafu, and so on. Mom took to calling Phinda “the gorilla.” “Got to go wrestle the gorilla,” Dad would tell us as he disappeared once again.
Eventually, from a run-down collection of farms with old windmills, barbed-wire fences, rusting equipment, and virtually no animals, Dad and CC Africa would create a gorgeous reserve that was home to the Big Five, more than four hundred species of birds, and the highest populations of white rhinos in southern Africa.
In the meantime, though, there was no time to shuttle us kids back and forth to school. Ironically, my parents’ vision of creating more reserves where people could experience nature in a new, profound way meant yanking me and Bron out of our own idyllic environment.
“You’ll be going to a new environmental school,” Mom told me and Bron, describing the school near Phinda where she had enrolled us. “You’ll be riding horses on a farm! You’ll board during the week, and then Dad and I will fly in and pick you up every weekend. It’ll be an amazing education!”
Whatever its aspirations, at that time the school was a place of last resort for troubled kids whose parents lived far away in broken homes. Despite its marketing, it seemed more like a reform school in disguise, the messianic redeemer of wayward children. The idea of getting little Johnny out of the mall, off crack, and into the wild must have been a great relief for the parents of these renegade children. Bron and I, by contrast, were in the small minority whose parents were still together. We were flung into a world where you got up at six to make your bed and slept locked in a room with thirty-four other kids. Everyone wore identical uniforms. Conformity was the operating principle.
For the first two weeks, we weren’t allowed any contact with our parents—the longest we’d been without them. I was gentle and undersized, a sensitive ten-year-old child of nature thrown in with these loud, troubled urban kids. I might as well have stuck a target on my chest. I was badly bullied from the beginning. A kid named Rory seemed to take special pleasure in beating me up. He was big for his age, with thick wrists and arms like a gorilla. The first time he hit me, solidly across the face, was one of the most shocking moments of my life. The mixture of rage and shame I felt was so unfamiliar. As my own blood dripped onto the porcelain bathroom basin, I wanted to run and hide.
Bron was foundering too, completely out of step with all the other girls and what they were doing, wearing, talking about. She was battling to fit in while all I tried to do was disappear into the crowd. But we knew we needed to be strong. From the time we’d been born, we had been told that our work was to protect nature and the animals. As young as we were, we understood what our parents were trying to do and felt an obligation to play our part in it by keeping a stiff upper lip at boarding school. So Bron and I drew on the resources we’d learned growing up in the bush and attempted to adapt and survive.
The administration didn’t seem to know what to do with us. Bron and I were constantly being tested. A bewildering sequence of verdicts was handed in: “These are the two most incredibly smart children in the world; they must go to the gifted classes.” “These kids are retarded; they have to go to the special ed class.” Eventually we were diagnosed as dyslexic. I was garlanded with other labels too: ADHD, hyperactive, a “problem child.” With each label, I felt dumber.
Occasionally I’d sneak out of school and climb a hill, curl up on a large, flat rock, and cry in privacy. The instinct to be alone in nature led me away from everyone; if I could just spend some time out in the wild by myself, I could regenerate. Soon Bron figured out my hiding spot and snuck up to give me pep talks. “Boydie, we gonna be fine,” she said, hugging me. “We gonna get through this. We’ve got the two of us.”
Perhaps the pep talk was for both of us.
One of the embarrassing side effects of having a sister who models herself on a lioness was her tendency to get into my fights. In the middle of beating me up, my assailant would sometimes mysteriously go down, attacked from behind by my loving and violent sister. I knew that the bullying would only get worse with Bron facing down my torturers, so I tried to stick it out, becoming more unhappy by the day.
Our visits with our parents were far more restricted than Mom and Dad had anticipated. As “termly boarders,” we could go home only four times during the school year. The first time back at Londolozi, Bron and I joined our parents at a dinner party. One of the guests, who had himself been sent off to boarding school at my age, asked me, “How’s it going?” I confessed to being bullied by Rory.
He had a solution for me: “What you do is, you get your cricket bat. You hide in your cupboard. When that guy comes past, with no one else around, you jump out of your cupboard, and you hit him hard one time with the bat. Make sure you get him real good. He won’t touch you again.”
Back at school, Bron and I planned the mission together. I waited for the right moment with my hunter’s instinct, then executed it to the last note. I came out of the cupboard in Rory’s room in a classic leopard ambush; he was close and unsuspecting. The first he knew of me was when my cricket bat slammed into his shin. Rory went down instantly, with a thick bump on the front of his leg. I followed up my opening assault with a flat bat to the upper leg. My heart was pumping; this was not me, but it was what I felt this place required of me.
Rory never hit me again. After that, everyone saw me in a new light. I was respected and started to amass a posse. Much to my astonishment, girls started to like me. Sports, at which I excelled, brought me approval from teachers and peers.
Bron, meanwhile, took on a mothering role. There were lots of broken wings for her to mend. The school offered a window into a harsh world, and we saw students who had walked quite a journey. Bron and I spent our three years there as psychologists, advising the other kids on how to handle their parents’ fights, divorces, and custody battles.
Some good did come out of our experience at the school. Growing up at Londolozi, we’d thought the whole world was perfect, that everyone was married and happy. Learning that this wasn’t so made us more compassionate. We also realized that we’d been a bit spoiled. We’d never made our own beds, cooked our own meals, or washed a dish. At boarding school, we made our beds with perfect hospital corners; we kept our cupboards inspection-ready and our uniforms immaculate.
Bron soon emerged as a strong leader and was voted prefect by the students and teachers. She also became an expert rule breaker who knew how to smuggle in food, ignore lights-out, and shimmy across the narrow space between the top of the dorm wall and the ceiling to get to the room with the party.
In our second year, after being the goats at boarding school, we were running the place. By year three, Bron and I had more than reconciled ourselves to our fate; we’d been forced to create our own subculture, and now we were living with it. We’d learned to curse extravagantly—everyone at boarding school swore like soldiers. We’d developed an anti-authority “fuck the man” attitude, although we weren’t quite clear on who the man was, or why we ought to fuck him. We wanted to hang out with our friends, whose small-town opinions we prized over the huge dreams of our parents.
Mom and Dad were losing us, and they knew it. One evening in Tanzania, they stood on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater, a sunken caldera that acted as a bowl for som
e breathtaking wildlife, ranging from flocks of flamingos in the salt lake to old elephant bulls ambling peacefully in the fever tree forests. They watched the sun set as this huge vista of Africa’s majesty spread beneath them. Dad turned to Mom. “I can’t believe our kids are missing this.” Mom said, “Let’s sort this out.” They’d made their decision before the sun had dipped below the horizon.
Bron and I were waiting at the school gate when Mom and Dad stepped out of the car. I could see by the look on their faces that this wasn’t going to be an ordinary Parents’ Weekend visit. Then an unfamiliar young woman emerged from the backseat. She was pretty, blond, and looked kind. Now I knew something was up.
“Kids,” Mom said, “we’d like you to meet our friend Kate Groch.” The pretty blond woman smiled. Bron and I shot sideways glances at each other.
We drove out the school gates and headed for a restaurant. After we ordered, Dad, in his usual extroverted way, jumped right in: “So. We’re taking you out of school. You’re going to travel with me and Mom. Kate is your new teacher.”
I couldn’t believe my bad luck. I was in love with a girl called Tessa, who had recently kissed me with her tongue. I was convinced that she was my true love.
I slunk down in my chair and glared.
“Do we have to?” Bron huffed.
Kate looked slightly shocked to find herself in the middle of an awkward family barney.
Sensing our pointed lack of enthusiasm, Mom went into overdrive: “You’ll love it! You’re going to be learning how to fix Land Rovers and see gorillas, and best of all, you’re going to learn how to do thatching!” Why she chose this odd example I will never know.
Thatching was the last straw. Bron stood up and, with a flair for the dramatic, stalked off. “Whatever,” she tossed over her shoulder.
Mom turned to me. “Yes, we think it’s going to be for the best. We’re traveling so much, putting up the camps, that otherwise we’d never see you.”
Bron arrived back at the table at the same time as her mushroom soup. She sat down and started to cry the uniquely bitter tears of a fourteen-year-old girl.
“Do you want to be alone, maybe talk it over for a while?” Kate asked gently. I wanted to hate her, but she looked like everything that is good in the world. We didn’t know it then, but she was already on our team. “You guys are really getting this dropped on you,” she told me and Bron. We weren’t being asked about it; we were being told about it. Kate understood how we must feel.
“No, not at all, we’re fine,” said Dad, giving a “we’re one big happy family” grin.
The lunch eroded into a lot of snot and trauma, but despite our reactions, the plan was set. Bron and I would be heading off into Africa with our new teacher.
When Kate came to teach us, she was twenty-three, but she looked more like nineteen. She’d grown up in a perfect Pretoria family, gone to a good girls’ school, come out of the University of Cape Town, and done her master’s at the University of Pretoria. She was constantly at rallies, fighting against apartheid. Her activist streak turned out to provide her with the perfect temperament to deal with two teens dedicated to sulking.
The plan was for us to study with Kate for a week in Johannesburg, spend a week in East Africa, where Mom and Dad were building lodges, then a final week at Londolozi. Uncle John had come along to look at the land being earmarked for reserves in Tanzania to scout its potential for filming. I spent that first week glaring holes into the back of Kate’s head when we drove anywhere. When it was time to fly to Arusha, Tanzania, Bron and I glumly packed our school bags. Kate tried to bribe us with Jelly Tots, a premium snack for the trip, but we weren’t having any of it.
We spent the first night in Arusha, perched on the eastern ridge of the Great Rift Valley, in an old plantation house that had been converted into a guesthouse on the slopes of Mount Meru. It was hot, and Bron and I were cranky.
“Come on, you two,” Kate told me and Bron, “we’re going for a swim.” This was the first time Bron, Kate, and I were alone together. I can’t remember what we spoke about, but when we got out of the pool, we were bonded. There is no way to describe the moment when someone becomes your friend; it just arrives, as Plato said, “as an act of ancient recognition.”
This was lucky, as Dad decided to change the plan. Again. “Your uncle John is going to be making a documentary,” he informed us. “You, Bron, and Kate are going to be the sound crew.”
“It’ll be educational!” Mom informed us. We could hear the note of insane confidence in her voice. At least it wasn’t thatching. Our week-long trip to East Africa was about to become a six-week extravaganza of “high action,” Uncle John–style.
“Hold tight, hold tight, we’re going down into the ravine!” screamed Moses, Uncle John’s Masai friend, out the front window of the Land Cruiser he was driving.
“Don’t worry about me, I’m solid!” I shouted from my perch atop the vehicle.
“Okay, just making sure!” called Moses.
Uncle John, below me, wasn’t so sympathetic. “Buddy, stay on the tires or you’ll dent the roof.” I shifted my grip on the pile of spare tires Uncle John had haphazardly strapped to the roof with ropes and pieces of shredded inner tube.
Thousands of wildebeests disappeared over the lip of a ravine. We tore after them.
Bron, Kate, and I were crossing the Serengeti with about two million wildebeests as they made their annual migration in pursuit of the rains. Each fall this mass of herbivores, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of gazelles and zebras, travels twelve hundred miles, from the hills of the Serengeti in Tanzania across the Mara River and onto the lush plains of the Masai Mara reserve in Kenya. There they will feed on the nutrient-rich grasses for the next four months before returning to the Serengeti. Along the way, nearly 250,000 of these bovines will lose their lives to exhaustion and dehydration. Lions, leopards, cheetahs, and other hunters rove behind the herds, hoping to pick off the stragglers. Those that survive the march will still have to make the onerous crossing of the Mara River, heavily patrolled by crocodiles. The great migration is one of the last remaining examples of the majesty of an open system in play.
Uncle John was the leader of the safari. Our two Land Cruisers looked like they might have been built by Noah himself. The one I was perched on had a broken speedometer and a door held in place with frayed wire. Various instruments were taped to the dashboards of both vehicles.
“So, what’s the plan?” asked Kate.
Uncle John tossed a snaggletoothed grin over his shoulder as he manhandled the steering wheel. “Couldn’t tell ya.”
An avid environmentalist and educator, Kate had seen every one of Uncle John’s documentaries. When he’d first leaned over and introduced himself—“Hi, I’m JV,” a line from virtually every movie he’d ever made—she’d felt as if she herself were in a documentary. Initially Kate had seemed a bit shocked at being plunged so deeply into Varty World, but she’d given herself over to the spirit of things quickly. “Oh well, I guess ‘make it up as we go along’ is going to be the order of the day,” she told us now. Still, sometimes she couldn’t believe the madness of this family, even though she always liked Uncle John and got on with him. “Everything is stuck together with duct tape!” she’d remarked earlier. “And that uncle of yours, he’s loony!”
From Arusha we headed to Ngorongoro Crater. I understood why my parents hadn’t wanted us to miss this sight. The flamingos on the lakeshore looked like colorful garnishes on the rim of a cocktail glass. At Ngorongoro, every scene is set against the rising rim of the crater, which dances from grassland into misty jungle as the altitude pulls you toward the clouds. It’s God’s mixing bowl. Beyond the crater, we traveled through fields of yellow flowers, down into Olduvai Gorge—the “cradle of mankind,” where early hominids had stamped their tracks in mud that had long since solidified, leaving a rocky trail of clues that had helped the Leakey family trace our evolution.
The Masai who had journeyed
with us had no bags of any sort with them. Tall and regal, dressed in their traditional red shukas, or blankets, and beaded and tasseled necklaces, they looked like Roman legionnaires without armor. They were the ultimate nomads, able to sustain themselves in an almost magical way. They knew which tree’s branches could be chewed into a fibrous toothbrush and so had no need for a toiletry bag. They did, however, make up for what they lacked in luggage by carrying weighty traditional weaponry, from machetes to long lion-hunting spears. “One of these days we going to leave Masai land and be in Wakuria country,” said Moses.
The Wakuria are the sworn enemies of the Masai. The tribes have been attacking each other for years in the hopes of rustling the other’s cattle, particularly on clear nights, when moonlight can help a running retreat. Recently the Wakuria did away with their traditional weapons and started carrying Russian-made Kalashnikovs: hence the reason we were armed to the teeth. As we drove out of Masai tribeland for a day in Wakuria territory, our carefree, relaxed Masai friends stiffened, adopting a frosty vigilance characterized by stony silence.
“What will happen if we do see Wakuria?” I asked Moses.
From his position behind the wheel, he gave me a sideways glance. “Blood,” he said, maybe for effect.
Somewhat anticlimactically, the Wakuria never appeared.
It had become unbearably hot in the cab of the Land Cruiser. All of us had salty sweat stains raking tie-dye patterns over our clothing. The dust sucked in through the window had settled onto Kate’s face; mixed with sweat, it made her look Polynesian. Bron was listening to a first-generation Walkman that was about the size of a household stereo. She’d become so bored with the sight of wildebeests streaming around us hour after hour after hour that she’d stopped looking out the window and was reading a book while singing along to Mariah Carey.