Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  It was one of the most terrible things I had ever seen. “Soy muerto! Soy muerto!” the poor man shouted. I’m dead, I’m dead. I will never forget the deep resignation in his eyes. If you were a believer, you might have said that angels were already there to carry him home. Or you might have said that his resignation was just the biological effects of shock. All I know is that when he’d woken up that morning on vacation, he’d had no notion that he would die horribly a very few hours later.

  Not ten minutes after the ambulance sped away, I walked back to the tour bus and ate a sandwich. A ham sandwich, to be specific, flesh between bread. At the time I didn’t even realize how bizarre this was, didn’t understand how thoroughly my life had slipped away from its wild innocence. The problem with the numbness caused by trauma is that when you’re feeling it, you don’t know it.

  You’re a fucking magnet, Varty. Back at Londolozi after my trip to South America, more traumatized than when I’d left, I quietly fitted myself back into bush life, taking guests out on game drives, playing attentive host at dinners, telling stories and cracking jokes on cue. I told my parents about my trip, but I never spoke to them about how I was feeling.

  On the surface, I probably seemed normal, but I’d begun waking in the night, my heart pounding, sweat pouring off me despite the dry air. On warm days after the morning game drive, I would leave the confines of the camp and wander like my ancestors had done down the lightly reeded footpath to a warm enclave of granite rocks where the cool Sand River flowed. The matumi trees stretched their knobby roots far into the depths, and I’d cling to them as the rapids flowed over me, giving me the sensation that I was being carried along by the current.

  The Sand River had always been special to my family. Inspired by an old black-and-white photo of his family swimming in its crystal-clear waters, my father had long kept vigil over it. He campaigned with a kind of manic vigor to fight the destruction of its waters. He charted its ebb and flow, flew helicopters its entire length to the catchment areas with government officials to showcase damage upstream, and came close to physical fights with CEOs of multinational forestry companies that threatened to destroy these catchments by planting nonindigenous trees. Dad knew that the river was critical to the survival of the park and to our own sense of well-being in the world. He was also aware that his spirit wouldn’t survive the death of something as magnificent as a river; none of our spirits would.

  In December 2002, near the end of my gap year, my fellow traveler Andy and two of his friends came to visit me at Londolozi. We were all in the same space, coming off gap years, getting ready for university, but I didn’t feel the same presence and lightness they seemed to exude.

  The day was hot and humid. I decided to lead the group down to the Sand River, feeling slightly muted in the face of the others’ exuberance. The clear, knee-deep water beckoned. I waded in while Solly, my ever-vigilant friend and tracker, wandered along the shore. I hadn’t wanted to drag him on the trip, but Bronwyn felt otherwise.

  “Boyd, if you go to the river, you take Solly,” she ordered in her older-sister ignore-me-at-your-peril voice. The force of her insistence surprised me.

  I was confident that there was no danger as I waded because I could see through the shallow water. I sat down where the sand dropped away into a small pool that skirted the bank. A large matumi tree cast a deep, inviting shade over me. My friends waded in the shallower water nearby as I leaned back into a small eddy created by a root that had been exposed by earlier floods. I stretched out until my legs were dangling in the water.

  Key word: dangling.

  A crocodile slamming its jaws onto your leg feels something like a pressurized vise clamp strapped to a grinding chain saw. “Get the fuck out of the water!” I screamed through the pain; my responsibility as a guide was ingrained.

  The croc tried to yank me into deeper water to drown me, but my hand found the matumi root and grabbed tight. I began to kick furiously. I can’t be certain whether my foot went so far down the croc’s throat that he regurgitated it or whether he simply let go, but suddenly I was free. Somehow I climbed from the water up the root and into the branches of the matumi hanging over the pool. The attack was over in seconds.

  I glanced down at my leg. Shit shit shit shit. It was lacerated beyond recognition. The entire back of my calf hung off in a great flap, exposing a silver-blue layer of flesh down to my Achilles tendon, stretchy white elastic with large holes torn from it. Blood poured from the huge, gaping wound.

  I never saw Solly go into the water, but there he was, standing over me, rifle loaded. He’d run through the river, past the croc, to reach me. It was a huge act of bravery; even though I’d dropped from the tree onto the bank, I was still badly exposed. Crocs can return and attack a second time.

  “Solly, get back! We have to get off this bank!”

  With one arm pointing the rifle at the water, Solly used the other to hoist me up. Pure adrenaline propelled me up the steepest part of the bank and onto the flat part of the floodplain, where I collapsed. I could barely breathe, almost choked by the smell of my own blood.

  Never panic. Never panic. My uncle’s voice reverberated in my mind. I began to calm myself and called for the other guys, who circled me, wide-eyed. Solly took his shirt off, and I wrapped it tightly around my leg, as a makeshift tourniquet. By the time he’d carried me to the nearby Land Rover, my blood had soaked through the fabric, leaving a thick smear across the paintwork on the side of the car. I wrapped an old dog blanket from the Land Rover around the shirt, trying to slow the bleeding and contain the meat of the leg.

  In a crisis, slow everything down. Now my father’s voice, echoing the old bush principle, was coming through like an old cassette recording. Andy was driving, in his haste steering the Land Rover over bone-jarring ruts and bumps, trying to get me back to camp as fast as he could. “It’s okay, Andy,” I told him through gritted teeth. “Slow down. Just slow down.”

  It took me a while to raise the lodge over the Land Rover’s radio. “This is Boyd. I’ve been attacked by a croc. I need a medevac organized.” Through Solly’s shirt and the blanket, my blood was still steadily gushing onto the gearshift. I wondered if I might die from blood loss. The shock had blocked out all pain; I felt strangely in control, albeit a bit light-headed. There’s a profound difference between knowing that you will die one day and wondering if this is that day, not at the end of a robber’s gun but as a result of your own stupidity.

  The lodge managed to contact a plane flying overhead, while a group of other guides met me out in the bush to rebandage the wound properly with first aid equipment. As they began to remove the bloody wrappings, one ranger caught sight of the wound and began to gag. The smell of blood in African heat is potent indeed.

  As the shock wore off, my leg started to throb fiercely, the pain escalating as if someone had cranked up the volume on a powerful stereo. Suddenly a chant sliced into my consciousness like a laser, one I’d learned from Karen Slater years earlier: Amaram hum madhuram hum. I am immortal, I am blissful.

  The unspoken sound filled my mind. Amaram hum madhuram hum.

  Back at the camp, they laid me down in my friend Alex’s office. I could hear him speaking to my mother on the phone.

  “Hi, Shan, it’s Alex.… Yes, fine, thank you.… Yes, true, we had a bit of rain last night.… Ah, Shan, yes, well, everything is okay. It’s just that Boyd got taken by a crocodile—no, no, I mean bitten! Bitten, not taken. He’s lying on the floor here. Ya, he seems fine, but we’re flying him to Nelspruit hospital.” Alex had adopted the understated reportage style of a Shangaan, but Mom knew better; the worst thing to hear in the safari business is “Everything is okay.”

  They drove me up to the airstrip to make the seventy-five-mile trip to Nelspruit. Each bump we hit jarred my leg, sending a spike of agony through my body. Bronwyn’s boyfriend, Simon, was holding my hand. I felt such warmth toward him; I’m sure trauma gives us a glimpse of others’ true nature.

/>   For some strange reason, the hospital staff kept calling me Charles, my great-grandfather’s name. When they told me they wanted to X-ray the leg “to see if there are any teeth left inside,” I had the fleeting thought that it would be very cool if there were.

  The surgeon, Dr. Pansagrau, did a remarkable job of putting my leg back together. I spent the next few days watching my leg turn various shades beneath 260 exterior and 80 interior stitches and praying that drip after drip of antibiotics would ward off infection. Mom was by my side, but in usual Varty style, after it became clear that I was going to recover, her sympathy started to wane. By the first afternoon, the whole family was over the excitement. When Uncle John and Dad called the hospital, they offered no solace; after all, my carelessness had provoked the first reported croc attack at Londolozi. (A very experienced Kruger Park ranger later said, “When it comes to crocodiles, what I’ve learnt is you should check your bathwater at night.”)

  I didn’t really want any visitors. People like to play up the machismo of surviving a croc attack, and it would be a lie to say that I haven’t, on a few occasions in bars, promoted my assailant to a twelve-foot beast that I killed with a toothpick. But, really, the story embarrasses me. It could have been someone else in the group that got attacked. I’d declared the situation safe, and I’d been wrong. I’d gotten my ranger certification barely a year earlier, and already I’d screwed up royally.

  The newspapers soon caught wind of the incident. Under the breathless headline “Croc Attacks Son of Conservationist,” one newspaper reported, “The only son of South Africa’s most influential conservation family … narrowly escaped death in a crocodile attack this week.” Dad used the coverage as an opportunity to promote river conservation. The attack was actually a “good sign,” my dad opined to the reporter: “It proves that crocodile populations are recovering from near extinction from the area in the 1960s. Water quality has improved, as have local conservation practices. We don’t consider this specific crocodile a problem animal, and will therefore not shoot it.” Uncle John figured that I’d escaped the croc only because my foot had accidentally kicked open his gular flap, a valve that seals the throat closed when the crocodile’s mouth is open underwater. He therefore turned my travails into a hit fireside song, “Kick Him in the Gular Pouch,” so he can torture me forever. That’s the Varty attitude in a nutshell: No big deal. Save the animals.

  I walked out of the hospital on crutches, with a calcified piece of bone under my right knee, a long scar down the back of my leg, and the family nickname of “Club Foot,” since my right foot now sticks out a bit awkwardly. But there were deeper scars.

  The very life of adventure that had once felt like a gift now seemed pointless and terrifying. The crocodile; the taste of gunmetal in my mouth; and the whisper “I will kill you.”

  I knew some things at the end of that year that I hadn’t known when it began. But though I showed it to no one, I felt completely bewildered, even after a desperate surge of seeking as hard as any pilgrim.

  Still, you wouldn’t have known this to look at me. I was like any regular nineteen-year-old with unruly hair, a scraggly beard, and leather bangles. While I stood on a precarious bridge, Shakespeare’s battalions rolled on.

  NINETEEN

  DEAD SILENCE

  THE LION GRIPPED THE WARTHOG AWKWARDLY. It had failed to clamp its jaws over the warthog’s windpipe, which allowed the hog to let out a squeal that was so close to a primal scream that even I was unnerved.

  All around us lions were springing up and rushing toward the awful sound. The guests, Solly, and I had just been sitting in the Land Rover, watching the pride laze about in the shade of a torchwood tree, when one of the females had ambled out of sight—in pursuit of a shadier spot, we’d thought. Then we’d heard the squealing. The sound changed the energy of the game drive, as if some ancient part of all of us had been shocked into life, the part that understood hunting, killing, danger.

  “Famba! Famba! Famba!” Solly screamed. “Go! Go! Go!” He wanted me to drive toward the sound so the guests could catch the action.

  A guest seated behind me was so excited that he started to slap the back of my head, screaming, “Get us in there! Faster, man, faster!” In seconds we were witnessing the carnage.

  Already the hog’s piercing squeal was being smothered by deep, ferocious growls as the lions lashed out at each other to protect their piece of the prize, their ears flattened, faces bloodied, massive paws slapping. At a kill, it’s every lion for himself.

  The scene was gruesome. Although the hog was still squealing for his life, the lions had ripped open his stomach cavity and begun to feed. Guests were snapping photos wildly, the sound of shutters opening and closing a continuous hum.

  I watched the guests closely, knowing that visually ingesting something like this can be challenging. After university, I’d gotten my ranger certification and had been back at Londolozi for three years. Part of my training had covered how to help guests handle the sharp end of nature when they come upon a kill. I was once again struck by our contrasting fascination with death and the horror of it. Sure enough, one woman’s expression shifted from rapt to stricken, and tears started to roll as she leaned into her husband. The husband gave me a look that indicated they’d seen enough, but the other guests weren’t close to sated, their cameras still humming.

  I decided that I’d inflict no more suffering on the weeping woman that day. Ignoring all complaints from the other tourists, I drove away from the scene.

  Now I know that we must always build space around real grief. We need to allow the pain to carve within us a deep knowing of what it means to live, to shape us as innocence never can. As Ram Dass says, “It is only in the dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees and to love as God loves.” I found myself admiring the guest who hadn’t blanketed her compassion for the warthog. I admired her for refusing to summon the false strength that robs us of our time to grieve. Grief should be treated as holy. When Gran died, I tried to give Dad all my spare emotional energy so I could make him okay. Later I understood that I could never dull his pain and should simply have let him feel it.

  I saw with unsparing clarity how death arrives hand in hand with every birth. That December, when the impalas had hundreds of babies and I saw that every leopard at Londolozi had hoisted a baby impala up into its tree pantry, I mourned the end of innocence all over again. “Before you can know kindness as the deepest thing inside,” says poet Naomi Shihab Nye, “you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

  Then my mother’s mother, Gorgs, was diagnosed with cancer and, after an initial course of radiation, refused further treatment. She moved to Londolozi a few months later and added herself into the rhythm around the house, although I sometimes felt as if our days followed a rhythm of her making. We all fell into a kind of slow motion.

  The family had planned a December vacation to Zanzibar; we’d be taking a plane, then getting onto a Land Rover to bump along back roads, then onto a boat to ride the chop to a remote island off the coast, where we’d live in grass huts—rough going for the hale, a seeming impossibility for a woman harrowed by radiation. What should we do about Gorgs?

  Dad called a family meeting. “Listen, I know she’s weak, and I know Zanzibar is tough to get to, but I think we should just take her with us,” he said. He’d always loved his mother-in-law.

  “I don’t know,” I worried. “She’s very frail.”

  “How will she get to meals at the hotel?” Bron fretted. “She’s so weak.”

  Dad had a solution: “Well, I or Boyd will carry her.” “The doctors say it’s not wise,” said Mom.

  “Doctors only know so much. I say we take her.” This is the resolved magic of my father. He knew she was going out; we all did. But he was willing to defy all the high theory and just carry her himself. And he did. We carried Gorgs on and off the boats. We carried her to meals. We carried her to her hut as if she were a new bride crossing the
threshold of her new home. She loved it, and she let herself be looked after. She played to the whole thing, sweeping her arm grandly. “Take me down to dinner, Boyd!” She had her first swim in the sea in thirty years. It was an unforgettable vacation.

  Gorgs had been a timid woman all her life. Now she’d started to live again. One day back at Londolozi, Mom and I looked out the window to see Gorgs approaching the electric fence that keeps the elephants out. She’d had a lifelong fear of elephants. Now, bent over, she ducked under the fence and quietly approached a small herd beneath a marula tree. I was finally meeting my real grandmother, free from fear, just in time to lose her.

  Phillip, our butler, tended to Gorgs with warmth and humility. He taught us so much about patience and the value of doing things slowly. He showed us how to take a dying woman to a sunny spot and just sit nearby until she wanted to move. “Ah, Gogo, I can do all things for you,” he would tell her, employing the term of respect for elders. He taught me how to really hold a loved one’s hand with no thought of your own pain until they slipped from this silly stretched-in-the-wash costume of a body. Phillip made the world a place of great care and love for my gogo as she sailed out.

  I saw something in that dear dying woman’s old, craggy face that was like a lightning bolt to something buried in me: an understanding that the life you are leading now is always defined by your choices and no other circumstances. Must we work this out so late, when we’re old and too afraid to wear a bathing suit?

  Gorgs would amble around the aloe garden my father’s mother had planted, to make peace with the fact that she was going to die. I watched her take her last walks amid the sunbirds and aloes, eat her last few mouthfuls of food, and then finally subsist on just the warmth of the winter sun.

  She asked to go back to her own home for a week. She was sitting in her small kitchen overlooking the Nelspruit valley, having her tea, when, with her usual dignity, she slipped from her body.