Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  We knew that Gorgs’s death was coming, of course; we’d started to prepare. But there was still that unfilled space from that ultimate parting. Mom was relieved that her mother was no longer suffering, but she was gutted by the loss. Her mother had always been her touchstone. I knew Mom was down and out when she softened enough to let us take care of her, allowing me to bring her cups of Earl Grey, Dad to run her baths, Bron simply to hold her.

  As if that weren’t enough, our beloved dog, Tatty, began to fail. We were supposed to be a pragmatic bush family; I’d thought that when the time came, we’d be like Farmer Bill—take her out back and end it right there. Instead, I’d find my mother spoon-feeding Tatty as she weakened, crooning, “You are my little darling.” Tatty had been with us through a couple years’ worth of harsh chapters. Her unconditional love and joyfulness had reminded us that there was still good in the world. From a spiritual perspective, dogs get it so right (except for the annoying yappers, which get nothing right). When that little golden retriever ball of light died, we knew we’d lost a beloved family member.

  Phillip was as deeply aggrieved by the death of Tatty as we were. To show his sadness and solidarity, he dug a grave so deep that in another two feet he might have hit lava. He didn’t want a scavenger to smell the decaying body and dig it up—a not-unlikely scenario in the bush. This made placing Tatty into the grave a bit of a logistical effort, with me standing inside it and Dad lowering her down while trying not to throw his back out.

  “Treat the body with dignity,” Mom said from the side.

  “I will, but she is bloody heavy,” I replied with a grunt.

  “Don’t get sand in her face,” Mom warned.

  “Stop telling me what to do!” I shot back childishly.

  We were all undone. Mom was clearly channeling her rage and grief over her mother’s death into mourning Tatty. Dad began tearing up. We said prayers and gave thanks to the universe. (Some days I think we should just start a commune, we’re such hippies, but we’re too busy for that.)

  We planted a tree in honor of our glorious pooch; she’d done well to survive all those years in the bush. The next morning, my mother awoke to see a nyala feeding on the tree. She found this most disrespectful, so while all the other trees she’s planted get broken and trampled by monkeys, elephants, baboons, and buffaloes, which thrash the trunks with their horns, Tatty’s tree is untouched, because in her sadness, Mom constructed such an impregnable wire fence around it that it could rival the Great Wall of China.

  We are all being whispered to our death. It is the white noise hissing softly beneath all other sounds.

  All of this took place in the space of about eight months, and then the final confusion arrived. My dad and uncle had gone into a project to create a sanctuary for tigers, so that when they went extinct in Asia, the game parks could be restocked from the reserve. This had all the earmarks of a classic Varty Brothers project. It was outlandishly ambitious: vast in scope, freighted with complicated logistics, and therefore irresistible. If they pulled it off, the project could stem the extinction of the wild tiger, of whom only about three thousand or so remain in the entire world. It drew on the brothers’ unique skill sets: Uncle John could apply everything he’d learned from raising Shingi and Jamu to reintroducing zoo tigers into nature and helping them raise future cubs in the wild, while Dad could apply his knowledge of restoration to bringing tracts of overgrazed land back to life. JV’s expertise as a documentarian would bring the tigers’ plight to international attention. By this time, Phinda and Londolozi had become big successes as restoration projects, so Dad and Uncle John were excited to tackle a new challenge. After the way Dad had been hammered by the loss of his mother and CC Africa, Mom was thrilled to see him excited and hopeful again.

  Dad and Uncle John threw themselves into this new venture, but in their eagerness to make the project happen, they went in too fast. As the project was finding its groove, one of the investors became disgruntled and accusatory and lobbed a lawsuit at us. The claims were endless and confusing, launching a legal battle that would drag on for years. The litigation exhausted us emotionally and financially, especially on the back of all that had already happened.

  For the first time, Bron and I saw our father truly beaten down. He and Uncle John had always been so sure of everything they did. Now every belief that said we lived in a protecting universe was completely erased. Our operating philosophy had always been: You stand together and you fix the problem. But here there was nothing we could fix; the process was complex beyond our understanding. I’d watch Dad take a call from his attorneys and hang up, drained. I’d come home to find him sleeping on the couch, curled up into a deflated ball, as if he’d been punched. It broke my heart. Often when I was near him, I could smell faint wisps of adrenaline on his skin—something you only really know if you’ve been near serious danger often.

  Once again I thought of “the Rumble in the Jungle.” Maybe Dad had somehow known that he would face a similar battle in his own lifetime. Without him asking, I became his cornerman. I was in the fight with him, even if I wasn’t throwing the punches.

  But how do you punch a cloud? In many ways, I wished it were a proper fight—at least there’d be something I could do. Here there was no physical action I could take—no robbers to outwit, no crocodile to outrun. The opponent was an ill-defined shape-shifter, impossible to corner.

  As the weight of the threat and the seeming insanity grew, the stress fell onto the entire family. The litigation stretched into a second year, then a third, a fourth. The family tried to keep up appearances—we had a game reserve to run, guests to greet, a village of employees to support—but there was no hiding our grief and panic. Bron handled every bit of lodge business with ferocious intensity, often starting at six in the morning and finishing at midnight. She worried that missing the smallest detail might manifest a grand disaster.

  I thought that if I could just do the right thing, be the good son, it would take some of the pressure off Dad. I was determined to give him emotional life support. So each morning, I woke up and took my war-horse off to plow the fields. I was there physically, animatedly pouring guests tea, taking people out on safari, fixing water pumps, but the wildest part of my spirit had fled.

  Our lives felt under threat, so we did what we knew how to do: we started drinking. We became piss-cats, hammering three bottles of wine in an evening.

  My sister was wrangling a roasted chicken out of the oven. With Fleetwood Mac blasting, she used her oven-mitted hand to pour herself a second or third glass of wine.

  “Can we turn the music down a little?” said Mom, already lowering the volume. She was on her second glass as well.

  This irritated Bronwyn, who felt that the chef should have ultimate control in the kitchen. She twisted the knob back up. By now, Fleetwood Mac had become a musical thermostat indicating the tension in the room.

  My way of dealing with this was to attack another beer and say, “Mom, just relax, we’re cooking in here. Go sit in the living room.”

  Saying “relax” had the opposite effect. “I am relaxed. It’s just bloody loud,” Mom shouted.

  “I’m in here, I’m cooking—just leave me to cook,” Bron said. Now we weren’t fighting about music. We were fighting about cooking.

  “Just calm down, everyone,” I said.

  Mom and Bron turned on me like angry lionesses. “Shut it, you. We are calm!” Bron bashed down pot lids to add to her point.

  “Don’t attack me! I’m just saying be cool!” I said.

  Dad walked in on cue. “Jesus, don’t shout!” He’d been asleep for half an hour. Between six and eight in the evening, he couldn’t stay awake; from eight to three A.M., he couldn’t sleep. It had been like that for months. The next song roared to life, and Bron clanged another pot.

  “What’s going on in here?” Dad wanted to know. No one answered.

  “Just carve the chicken,” Mom snapped.

  Dad started to bellow alo
ng with the music. “Dad, bring it down a notch,” I said, trying to keep the peace.

  “If it’s too loud, you’re too old!” Dad unleashed a slogan he’d heard on the radio, unwittingly pissing Mom off completely. “Did you order those curtains for the camp?” he asked her. At eight o’clock at night, Dad was starting a lodge operations meeting.

  “I ordered them from Johannesburg, but they screwed up the order,” Mom told him.

  “So are the curtains coming or not?”

  “They are, but a week late.”

  “Well, what should we do till then, have no curtains for the guests? They must fucking get them here!” Dad grabbed the wine and poured himself a generous glass. He slammed the bottle down next to the empties on the counter.

  “You don’t have to tell me that! I know that!” Mom growled.

  Dad winced. “Let’s not talk about it now.”

  “Then why did you bring it up?”

  Bron let out an exasperated snort. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Everyone, please, let’s be civil,” I pleaded. “Everything is fine. We’re having a conversation, not invading Russia.”

  “Everything is not fucking fine, and you know it!” My sister was now crying. I went silent, trying to be the calm and rational one. “Ya, I’m also going to bed,” I said, and stalked out of the kitchen, leaving Mom and Dad and an uneaten roasted chicken.

  I walked out of the house, toward my cottage. I was screaming inside. The night seemed so still, like it was holding its breath. We all were.

  Indhawu yi nwanyani. It’s gone to another place. This term is used by Shangaans to describe the utter destruction of an inanimate object or the demise of a person. In true understated Shangaan style, you might be told that the tractor “has gone to another place” when a better description would be “the tractor lost control while crossing a steep section of the riverbank, resulting in it crashing into a particularly deep hippo pool, where it now lies like the wreck of the HMS Lusitania at twenty fathoms.” If something has gone to another place, it’s truly broken.

  I’d gone to another place.

  Being depressed is one thing when your life can be seen by outsiders as justifiably hard, but it is a whole different shameful story when you have everything and still feel like you can’t bear to get out of bed in the morning. People can’t really be sympathetic to you when they can’t begin to fathom what you could be so upset about.

  The fear of losing everything, including Londolozi, was paralyzing for me. I spent as much time as I could alone, ashamed that I was lost among plenty. God, I was so tired of being tired all the time, and I felt like I had no right to be. I wanted my hair to mat into one gnarly, twisted dreadlock so I looked as haggard as I felt. Every night, while the others started singing around the fire, I would slip away to be by myself with the stars, even though their presence now made me feel insignificant whereas before I had felt part of the grand harmony of this world. It’s said that depression is undiagnosed homesickness, but where was home for me?

  One night I drove to a staff party that was taking place on the tiny airstrip where the puddle jumpers ferried guests from Johannesburg to Londolozi. Airstrip parties were renowned as fertile ground for madness. We would make a fire on the apron and under the stars something part tribal stomp, part native ceremony, part mating dance would ensue. I’d always been among the most enthusiastic participants, leading the charge with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s permanently welded to my hand.

  This time I cut the lights and steered the Land Rover towards the gathering. The roosting water thick-knees lined the airstrip, their high-pitched contact calls piercing the night air. Beyond them I could see the shadowy silhouettes of the assembled crowd laughing, dancing, singing around the fire. I turned the Landi around in the moonlight. Unsure why I couldn’t be there and dreading equally as much being alone, again I swung the car back towards the gathering. The instant I faced the fire, I just kept the wheel locked and again swung away. The revelers in the distance were completely unaware of my manic loops. Part of me wished that someone would break from the crowd to find me. I was afraid that I was mad, that no one would understand. Eventually I turned the engine off. It was suddenly very silent; then the thick-knees called their eerie faint whistle. My life had become an endless loop to nowhere.

  One day I dragged myself to a game of touch rugby with my fellow guides. One of the guides accidentally ankle-tapped me. In the seconds after I hit the dirt, the white-hot weight of year after year of litigation landed. The lights went out: I rushed the guide and started to punch him. I was lined up to kill him. “Leave it alone! Leave it alone!” another guide yelled, grabbing me. Everyone pulled us apart. I couldn’t say anything.

  I stalked away from the field and then to my cottage. I went into my room and then into the bathroom and then into the shower, pulling the sliding door closed behind me. If there had been another door to lock behind me, I would have pulled it tight. I wanted to be shut away—for myself, yes, but more for the good of others. I felt I’d brought disharmony to Eden. The only noble option in my mind was to cast myself out, but how could I leave when my father was depending on me? I didn’t want him to have my madness to worry about, on top of all his other problems.

  The years of litigation had taken their toll on Bron, too. One day she and I went out for a hike. What we thought would be a casual walk up a gentle hill turned into a five-hour forced march over steep terrain. Eventually we were within sight of the summit, with about three hundred yards to go, when Bron stopped suddenly and declared, “I’m done.” Her skin seemed very pale, almost anemic. But her jaw had that strong, set frame, and the skin between her eyes had crinkled into a sharp furrow.

  “Are you joking?” I said. “The summit is right there.” It was cold on the hillside, and as I stood there dripping with sweat, the wind suddenly chilled me.

  Bron glared at me. “Listen, Boyd, I’m done. I’m over this. I’m going to sit right here. You go where you need to go. This is my summit.”

  So much frustration boiled inside me. All the unspoken anxiety could spill out when I least expected it. “What the fuck are you doing? There’s the summit right there!” I jabbed my finger toward it. “Why won’t you just go the last bit? We’ve come all this way.” I needed badly for her to want the real summit for herself. “Don’t do all the hard work, then sell yourself short so close!” I was shouting now.

  “Boyd, I’m not going! I don’t care if it’s Mount fucking Everest—I’m not going any farther.” Now Bron was shouting, too. “I don’t need any more shit in my life … not one more step of struggle. I am not going farther. I am done done done with feeling like the sky is going to fall on my head. I’m done being pushed, I’m done with courts and lies and fearing I’m going to lose it all. I am done.” Tears were rolling down her face. She, too, had gone to another place.

  After all we’d been through, the litigation was a final act of violence that had shredded in me the desire to do anything. From within the storm that blew up in my own teacup of a life, I had to find my way back to a sense of vitality.

  To seek the wellness in the soul we’ve lost, we return to what we know best. For me, that place was nature. Nature as a physical space that reframes and recasts one’s inner space. Nature as an outer world that, like no other force, facilitates the journey to the inner world. Nature as healer.

  TWENTY

  THE VAV

  CHEVAVANE ARRIVED AT THE gate to Londolozi with an old duffel bag slung haphazardly over his shoulder. His T-shirt and jeans were ragged, but he sported a worn yet stylish Stetson drooping on his head and a huge, obviously fake Rolex on his wrist. He was a wiry Shangaan man with scarred arms, clearly uncomfortable in the presence of whites. His eclectic clothes hinted at an underlying contradiction. Somehow, beneath his roguish edge was a profound humility.

  Chevavane was the most famous outlaw in the area, and from the moment I heard his name, I knew we had to meet. I wanted to find someone who lived of
f the land, who still knew all the old-school secrets of hunting and gathering in the bush. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, people in that area had lived off the land. Then those areas were declared national parks, effectively turning hunters into poachers overnight.

  I want to make a clear distinction here. Yes, Chevavane was breaking the law. But I couldn’t see his crimes the same way I saw those of poachers who hunted for black market profits. These poachers will kill rhinoceroses just to take their horns, ripping through an already declining population. Chevavane hunted for bush meat; he killed only what he and his family needed to eat. He had a skill for living off the land that was hard to come by, and it was this knowledge that I wanted.

  I called in a favor with the Mhlongo family, the leaders of a nearby village, and they convinced the Vav, as I’d come to think of him, that I had no intention of arresting him. In fact, quite the opposite; I wanted to hire him to teach me everything he knew. My message traveled by bush telegraph, like a faint song on the breeze. He agreed to come, but only under major duress.

  Two weeks later, Chevavane appeared.

  We gave the guard a false name—after all, Chevavane was a wanted man. On the drive toward the game reserve, I turned to him. “Thanks for finally agreeing to meet me.” He simply nodded his head and gave me a wry, crafty grin.

  For three months I lived alone in the bush with the Vav. We shared a love for silence and slingshots. We drank out of the river, hunted birds, and followed lions to sharpen my tracking skills. His style of tracking was to string together a broad concept of where the animals were and then walk a brisk zigzag, picking up the quarry’s trail here and there. The Vav had a homemade spear, an old fence pole with a sharpened end, that he could fold into his duffel bag. He was a surgeon with that spear; he handled it with a grace and precision that made it an extension of himself. He claimed to have killed Cape buffalo with it. The Vav seemed to have no concept that wild animals might be dangerous; the first time we encountered a snarling male lion, his response was to unleash a penny-sized pebble into the lion’s rump with his slingshot and then laugh thunderously. Everywhere we went he found something to snack on: date palms in the river, milkberries on the bank, sour plums inland on hot days.