Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  We drove out for a few miles, to where we estimated the roar had come from. By the time we got there, it was getting light and faint tracks were beginning to become visible on the road. I spotted the saucer-sized pugmark of a male lion.

  “Okay if we go on foot from here?” I asked, swinging out of the Land Rover and unslinging the rifle from the rack. “Jen, your job is to keep looking around for the lion. I’ll be watching the tracks.” Jen nodded.

  We began to follow the tracks, me crouched over and walking ahead, Jen behind me, scanning the area. I looked like an old Vietnam vet with my boots, rifle, and camo winter jacket three sizes too big. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell tracking lions.

  I noticed that one of the giant pugs had a smaller track faintly superimposed onto it. A nocturnal white-tailed mongoose had walked across these tracks. At first I’d thought the tracks looked so fresh, but now I realized that the lion had walked down this road hours before, in the middle of the night. Lions can travel twenty miles in a night of hunting; there was no telling how far away he might be now. I was feeling a little despondent when I heard a lion roar about two-thirds of a mile away. Then a second roar started. Two lions! This was such a lucky break.

  I grabbed Jen by the wrist and began to trot in the direction of the roars. Three minutes later, the lions roared again. I could tell they were moving fast—and directly toward us. I spotted a game path—a byway through the bush created by animal traffic—leading into the clearing where we were standing. I was certain that the lions were walking along that path. They’d be on us in a matter of minutes.

  “They’re heading straight toward us. Are you ready for this?” I asked Jen.

  The look on Jen’s face suggested that the reality of the situation was only now landing, but she also had a spark of excitement in her eyes. “What will they do?”

  “Don’t know. Just do exactly what I tell you,” I said, squeezing her hand. I’d have to make a split-second assessment of their body language to gauge what kind of mood the lions were in. When a lion comes at you in a warning charge, its body is tightly coiled, it moves unbelievably quickly, its tail lashes from side to side, its lip curls up to reveal its powerful canines, and the sound of its growl makes you think it has a dirt bike in its belly. Often it will stop only yards in front of you. On these occasions, you must under all circumstances stand your ground and face up to the lion. “It’s afraid of your courage,” my uncle always used to say. Lions aren’t used to other creatures staring them down. It’s a good tactic for life, too; even if you’re terrified inside, stare it in the eye.

  Jen and I ran about thirty yards to a spot safely back from where the game path entered the clearing and dove into the dewy grass. Jen was still holding my hand, both of us panting with fear and excitement.

  Suddenly there they were, two huge adult males, black-maned, their deeply pronounced muscles bunching as they glided fluidly into the clearing on massive paws. As they came into view, they began to roar again, setting the ground shaking.

  The lions were now twenty yards away. Jen and I were still holding each other tightly. I could see by the speed they were moving that the lions had no interest in us. They passed right by us, most likely in search of the rest of the pride. With each step they took away from us, a little more electricity drained out of the air. I discovered a grin on my face I couldn’t get rid of. My heart was still pounding. This was what lion tracking was all about.

  Suddenly we were laughing hysterically, and neither of us knew why.

  “Oh, my sweet Jesus, can you believe that?” was all we could say, lying on our backs in the damp grass.

  That was the track to my right life. That feeling of aliveness would not always reach the intensity set by the lions, but it was the direction I needed to head in. Tracking is like putting together a puzzle with no idea of what the picture is—faith in an as yet undefined future.

  You don’t know who will change your life. You can’t foresee the circumstances that will connect you with your helpers. One thing I do know: even out in the middle of the African outback, the right people will show up if you are open to their arrival, if you allow yourself to ask for help. I now understood what I wanted and how to track it, even if I wasn’t quite sure how to get it.

  One day I found myself standing in front of the allocations board full of guests’ names; each name had beside it the initials of the guide who’d be taking that person on safari. In the silence of the game rangers’ room, I committed the ultimate breach of guiding etiquette and rubbed a colleague’s name off and placed my own initials—a tiny “bv”—next to the name of a guest another guide had told me about. “There’s this woman who asks you really interesting questions,” he’d told me. “She’s quite cool. She’s gonna come back here sometime. You should meet her.” My body seemed to be operating independently of my mind. This was how I met the master tracker who would help guide the next steps of my journey.

  Martha Beck arrived on my game drive when I most needed her. Life has a greater imagination than I do: if you had told me, in the depth of my dark, silent time, that a twenty-something, beer-drinking, meat-eating, rugby-playing farm boy from South Africa would find his mentor in the form of a wispy former Mormon Harvard PhD, I would have called you an idiot.

  Martha’s neck looks like it works hard to hold up her head, partly because her intellect is so big. Despite her fragile frame, however, you shortly start to see her as immensely strong. She fills a room in a way you cannot imagine. She is one of those radiant people who become more beautiful with each moment you spend with them. She’d written a memoir about having a son with Down syndrome and some books on life coaching that were bestsellers in South Africa, but I didn’t know that then. I only knew that she was someone gifted with incredible intuition and that I felt deeply drawn to her.

  That afternoon, I took Martha out on a game drive. We came upon a small herd of elephants foraging in the waning light. Toward the back of the herd I saw Elvis.

  I’d first come upon Elvis five years earlier. A herd of elephants were drinking from a deep hollow in the earth where some rainwater had gathered. In the middle of the group stood a tiny, deformed female elephant whose back knees were inverted and fused, so that her hindquarters were a bow of sloped discomfort. Another ranger had dubbed the little lady Elvis—playing off Elvis “the Pelvis” Presley—because of the way her pelvis swayed when she walked. This poor, undersized elephant would probably be dead in a couple of days, I thought; the herd would leave her behind, and she’d soon buckle under the weight of her own body and perish.

  Suddenly the matriarch turned and led the herd up a steep bank toward a clearing. Elvis pivoted to follow. For a second she seemed to psych herself up, and then she attempted the bank. Her back legs buckled, and she tumbled down the slope. She tried a second time, and again she lacked the strength. On her third attempt, an amazing thing happened. A young teenage elephant walked up behind her and, propping her trunk and forehead against Elvis’s flanks, very gently began to shovel her up the steepest part of the bank. I was astonished; I’d never seen this kind of behavior among elephants.

  A few days later, I watched the matriarch plucking branches from a tall tree. She placed every other branch on the ground so that Elvis could get it, feeding herself with alternate mouthfuls. The entire herd was caring for its little invalid.

  Remarkably, Elvis returned to Londolozi with her herd every winter. It was always thrilling for me to be out in the bush and come across her unique track, a backward bracket drawn in the sand by the strange drag of her back legs. I would follow it, sometimes for hours, to see this special little lady who was so full of pluck despite her deformity.

  On that game drive, I shared Elvis’s story with Martha.

  “My son has a disability, too,” she told me. “Elvis has a similar carriage to Adam’s. That is officially my favorite elephant ever.” I immediately liked that about her: where others saw only deformity, Martha saw kinship.

  It’s
strange how we find our own lives reflected at us in nature. I felt a kinship with Elvis too, but for a different reason. I felt as vulnerable as Elvis looked.

  Martha was a guest, so I tried to remain professional, but when you get to know her, you see that it’s pretty impossible to hold back in her presence. I couldn’t believe that anyone could be so unconditionally kind to a relative stranger. After the game drive, we sat on the front deck of Tree Camp, the vervet monkeys surrounding us. Soon I found myself telling her, “I know this is sort of strange, but could I ask you about some stuff?”

  Martha looked at me with her calm, bright blue eyes. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask.”

  “I’m really worried about my family. They’ve been under so much pressure.” I gave her a run-down of the litigation. How everyone was locked in fear, our emotions so volatile that we could suddenly find ourselves in a screaming match over the color of couch cushions.

  “And what about you?” Martha asked. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine. I just think what’s happening is so unjust.”

  “It sounds horrific.” She seemed to pin my attention where I didn’t want it to stay, then waited for me to speak.

  “Everyone has their challenges,” I told her. “If we just keep positive, things will go right.”

  “Mm-hmm,” she said. Then: “Have you tried just acknowledging that something terrible is happening to you?”

  “That’s not what we do. We don’t talk about the problem. We just keep shooting for the solution. We just keep going. That’s who we are. We’re bush people.”

  Martha chuckled softly. “And how’s that going?”

  “Not so well, I guess.”

  “You have to accept what you’re going through before you can get anywhere better,” she said. “The only foundation you have is the truth. You’re all acting like nothing’s happened. You’re playing parts in a giant act, and acting leaves you exhausted and frayed and angry. Offer your parents your best—that’s all you can do. Do your best—that’s all you can do. Trying to do more just sacrifices you on the altar of being supportive. That isn’t going to help anyone. If you want them to heal, you work out how to heal. If you want them to feel joy, you work out how to find joy. The best you can do for your dad is be happy. That means you go where the tracks send you. You need to learn who you’re becoming, and then teach your parents who you’ve become.”

  The whole interaction with this woman from miles away had taken no time. You can know someone for years, and they have no effect on you. You can know someone for five minutes, and they change your life forever. I felt like Martha was talking the most sense I had heard in a while. In this brief encounter, the light had been switched on in some way. I had the simple realization that life and strife are not the same thing, that the only way I could help anyone else was first to help myself.

  At that very moment, the elephants walked into the clearing, pausing right in front of us. They stopped and extended their trunks, exploring our scent; or maybe they were saluting—who can say? The herd parted, and suddenly, there was Elvis again. “You can’t really understand care until you give it to yourself,” Martha had just told me. In the simplicity of that moment, it felt like Martha was the elephant matriarch gently placing branches on the ground for me.

  As Martha continued to speak, I felt a tug in my center, a pull I was learning to respect as an inner track. Something inside me was telling me to travel again, even if it meant absconding from the post of the good son and my self-imposed obligation to stay and support my family. It seemed crazy and selfish, but I decided to keep following that path, no matter what. It was time to leave Londolozi again.

  But where to go? I began lunging toward every thought that occurred to me. For a while I was obsessed with the Lugenda River, in the most remote part of northern Mozambique. I decided I was going to paddle down it because there’s no one there, no one to help you. I wanted it to be possible that I might not come back. Maybe, my mind said, this adventure would make it all okay. Or maybe I’d join the French Foreign Legion. Yes, that was it: I’d be a soldier.

  Or maybe I’d sail a boat from Cape Town to Brazil, put myself in the hands of the elements. My mind loved the story. Nothing else within me leapt at it.

  I paced and paced, pelting Bron with a different great idea every day until she said, “Fine, you can do any of these things if you think you need to do them. But before you do that, do me a favor. Shut up for a while.”

  So I did. I shut up for about ten days. I stopped trying to think of what I would do with my newfound time and freedom. I stopped thinking I should do anything. I just shut up. And that’s when I heard the first real directive from within. It said: Go back to India.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE MEDICINE

  “SO WHAT’S THE DEAL when I see this guy?” Dad asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I guess you just lay it all out.”

  Dad wasn’t used to meetings with enlightened types. But when I’d told him that I wanted him to join me for an audience with the master in India, he hadn’t hesitated. It was a sign that he, too, was searching for resolution.

  Seven years earlier, the master had told me to experience the world, to come back to him when I was ready to seek within. Now that a longing for reconnection to my spiritual side had been reawakened, I was sure he would help me find my answers. I hoped he’d help Dad, too. Although he was essentially a practical man, Dad had always been open to examining all approaches to the spiritual path. Every year, he would ritually write the core principles from The Path of the Masters into the front of his work diary. “These guys are on to something,” he told me. “Wish I had the discipline to meditate.” He was closer than he thought.

  It had taken three days, two plane rides, and assorted trains and taxis to get from Londolozi to the ashram. We made a beeline for the master’s home, weaving our way through the dense New Delhi traffic, millions of scooters darting around the car like a school of remoras around a shark.

  We met the master in the living room of his estate house. Dressed all in white with his immaculate turban, he projected a powerful presence that commanded respect. Dad told our story. When he finished, the master simply looked at us and said, “Know your truth, stick to the process, and be free of the outcome.”

  I waited for more, but he was finished. I could feel the love in the master’s gaze, but I didn’t want love, I wanted a solution. Part of me was screaming silently, “Do a goddamn miracle!”

  A three-day journey for a twenty-minute audience? I walked away sick with disappointment, the deadness back in my mind, no solution to enforce. “Know your truth, stick to the process, and be free of the outcome.” So simple. So obvious. “I could have gotten that from a fortune cookie,” I snarled to myself. The yoga teacher at Londolozi was probably telling a batch of guests the very same thing right now. Why the fuck had I dragged my father all the way to India to hear it?

  As we drove back to the airport, I could see that Dad was disappointed in the audience, too. “Well, that’s a long way to come for a sentence,” he said. He was being kind. I’d made all the arrangements and had asked him to run a three-day gauntlet and now had so little to show for it.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. I guess with all that’s gone wrong, I was just kind of expecting a lightning bolt,” I said. “Something has to give—something has to bounce our way.”

  Dad stared out the window at the New Delhi traffic racing around us.

  Dad went back home to Londolozi, and I stayed behind. I wandered down to the south of India. I had reached a point where I needed space from the people closest to me so that I could concentrate on my own reclamation. An element of selfishness is a required part of healing, but if you get right, it ultimately leaves you with more to give.

  For months I paced, suspended in a place of complete uncertainty, trying to find the next track. I had no idea of what I was meant to be doing, but that was all right for now. Then Martha call
ed. “Come to Arizona,” she said. “There’s someone here I want you to meet.”

  Arizona in August was like the set of a cowboy movie being baked in an oven. During the middle of the day, the earth was bleached by the sun; the buildings quivered and floated on a mirage. Cactuses burst out of the earth like upside-down taproots, appearing simultaneously out of place and perfectly positioned. The bushveld and the desert share a common witching hour through the middle of the day; nothing moves in that kind of searing heat.

  The desert reserves its magic for the late afternoon, when the light fades from white to gold and washes up against the jagged towers and rocky outcrops that lift out of the earth like rising swells. The heat calls to clouds that will not give water without the anger of lightning. Watching the clouds build from miles away, you might catch the faint hint of rain on the air, and the scent of it is the smell of respite. The desert wants to sit you down, hold you down, and then baptize you. The desert is the definition of harsh beauty, the home of silence and the keeper of stillness. It is a challenging friend.

  Martha had guided me to friends running a Navajo sweat lodge, and a ceremony was scheduled to take place in the desert town of Guadalupe. Something in me wanted to face this.

  The ceremony was surrounded by festivity. Firecrackers illuminated the still desert heat. A whole pig roasted on a ragged front lawn as stray dogs sniffed the perimeter. Guadalupe was poor and marginalized, with high levels of unemployment and alcoholism—an unlikely stage, I thought, for a sacred ritual. I was nervous, not knowing what was coming—the heat, song, and spirits, and the sacred medicine of peyote—but I sensed that it would change me.

  The ceremony began in an odd way because the elder leading it was late getting off from his job in construction. When he finally arrived and everyone jumped up to make a fire, Darryl, a Navajo medicine man with long raven hair and a huge presence under his gentleness, took me aside. Under his guidance, I gave praise for the fire by sprinkling cedar into it. I set an intention, crouching down as Darryl fanned tobacco smoke over me with an eagle-feather fan. Each of a series of football-sized stones was praised and blessed before it went into the fire, where it baked until it glowed red-hot.