by Goldie Hawn
“Ah, Goldie, I am so happy to meet you,” he says, in an accent that sounds more English than Mark’s. “Get ready for the second part of your magical mystery tour.”
“Thank you, I will.”
“So tell me why you came to India to make a documentary on elephants.”
“Well, first of all, I love India,” I tell him. “I first came here in nineteen eighty. And then when I came back in nineteen eighty-two with my nephew Michael, for some crazy reason I ended up at Kabini River Lodge, to see the wildlife. One morning, on a safari, we came across a clearing, and standing in the most beautiful light was a female elephant grazing, her little girl ellie at her side. They were all alone. I noticed that she had a big white circle around one eye. Our guide told us that she was blind, and that her baby daughter stood watch while she grazed, acting as her eyes, ready to warn of any dangers.
“He called the mother Belly Button, because she had such a prominent one. It was an incredible sight, this mother being protected by her daughter. I was so moved by the connection between these two beasts. I’m coming to try to find her again.”
Aditya smiles. “Well, my dear, you’re in India. Anything is possible. You must trust in destiny.”
At that point, our old car—yes, another Ambassador—coughs and splutters to a halt once again. A huge explosion out of the rusty exhaust pipe makes its own singular contribution to India’s pollution crisis.
“Trust in destiny? Are you kidding? How about trusting in a mechanic every now and again!”
We both burst into peals of laughter. I never thought I’d find someone who laughed as much as me, but I’ve met my match in Aditya.
A few hours later, we pull up to a government warehouse, where our crew has set up the camera ahead of us. They start rolling as Aditya helps me out of the car.
“This is something you must see,” he tells me. “This is why you’re here.”
The camera follows me into room after room, stacked floor to ceiling with tusks and ivory and elephant skulls, big and small. Wandering through this vast skeleton graveyard, which smells of the sandalwood they’ve also confiscated, I’ve never seen anything like it. How can they slaughter these beautiful animals just for their tusks? What a terrible waste. I didn’t expect this part of the journey to be so sobering.
We move on and eventually reach the beautiful reserve I remember so well, where I first saw Belly Button seven years before. Arriving at night, we find a guard jumping around like a madman in the middle of the road. His ashen face glares pale in the headlights of our car.
“What is it?” asks Aditya, frowning.
“A lone tusker, sahib,” he replies panic-stricken, pointing down the darkened road. “He’s been standing there for over an hour. It is most unusual, sahib. Most unusual.”
The driver turns our car so that the headlights pick out the big bull elephant standing regally across the road, ears flapping, his tusks glowing white. In India, only the males have tusks, and the lone tuskers are considered the most dangerous.
“He’s come to welcome you, Goldie,” Aditya whispers. “He has come to thank you for what you are doing. This is his salute.”
As I turn to look at the tusker again, openmouthed, he lifts his great trunk into the air, blasts a trumpeting call into the warm still night and lumbers off into the jungle from which he came.
Kabini River Lodge is a little more run-down than I remember it, with its peeling Raj villas and rickety ceiling fans set in a forest of rosewood and teak. Thankfully, dear Papa is still in charge. Having chosen to stay on after independence, he is now older and a little frailer, but he is still full of such passion for the creatures he loves. It’s wonderful to see him again.
Later that night, I sit around the campfire having dinner with Papa and the crew, learning more and more about elephants. Papa is full of wonderful stories, many of them from firsthand experience. He tells me that when an elephant goes into labor, she is tended to by three or four other female elephants, who act as midwives.
“And when an elephant is dying, the rest of the herd try to hold it up. Using their trunks, they lift and caress and encourage, until they can do no more. Then they hold a funeral. They cover the body with leaves and twigs; they gather around in circles and they weep. Later, they return to draw the tusks, burying them deep in the jungle or smashing them against trees, almost as if to defy the ivory traders.”
Listening to his stories, I can’t help but wonder. “What if my Belly Button is dead?” I ask him. I can hardly bear to think about it.
“Well, if that is so, then it would be the natural cycle of things, but she would not be forgotten,” Papa tells me. “Not by you, and not by her herd. Elephants cannot pass the bones of a dead elephant without stopping to examine the remains. They seem to be remembering how their loved ones looked. I once found an orphaned baby elephant, dehydrated and weak after days of standing over its dead mother, rhythmically caressing the bones of her face.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “I had no idea they had such a strong emotional life,” I say.
“If they feel so deeply, then why do they kill?” the director asks.
Papa nods sadly. “Elephants rarely kill unless they are threatened. I knew of one who accidentally killed his favorite mahout, thinking he was the one who abused him. When he realized what he’d done, he circled the body and wouldn’t let anyone near it. Bereaved, he wept real tears. He even tried to revive him. Only when he realized there was nothing he could do did he let the family take the body away.”
We listen in stony silence.
Early the next morning, the crew are up and out before dawn. “Stay here,” they tell me. “We’re going to look for Belly Button.” They have been speaking to the wardens on the three vast nature reserves, and several reports have come back of a blind ellie living in the same area where I saw her before.
When they return, several hours later, I cannot tell from their faces if their search has been successful or not. No one tells me anything. They just ask me to go with them, and they lead me to the riverbank and a boat. We speed down the beautiful Kabini River, past crocodiles and cormorants and fishing eagles, all the while looking, searching for my elephant.
We see many elephants, but, sadly, not Belly Button. As the day goes on, the sun beating down on my neck, I grow steadily pessimistic. Is it possible that I’ll come all this way and miss her? When the water becomes too shallow, Aditya and I shift into a tiny coracle boat made of bamboo and buffalo hide, which spins and twirls out of our control, a metaphor for life.
Farther down the river, which has been dammed, we come across the ruins of an old Ganesh temple, a shrine to the elephant god. Aditya and I swirl and spin around it, getting close enough for me to reach out and touch the sacred stone, asking for its blessing.
I float precariously down the River Kabini. It’s so peaceful here, but, instead of relaxing, I feel my eyes darting right and left to each muddy bank, desperately looking for this elephant. My heart is in my mouth. What if we don’t find her? We already have plenty of material for the documentary, but everyone agrees that it would be dramatic to wrap it up with the rediscovery of my Belly Button.
Spotting another wild herd covering themselves with mud against the sun and bugs, we clamber out of the coracle and straight into quicksand, where I sink up to my ankles. Trudging through it with Aditya holding on, I feel like I have moon boots on, the wet mud is so encased around my feet. Reaching drier land, we creep quietly on through the brush and trees to the edge of a clearing.
“Shhh!” Aditya whispers, pressing a finger to his mouth as we crouch closer and closer.
I must admit I’m a little frightened. I don’t know what to expect. I’ve never been this close to a herd of wild elephants before. My breathing becomes more and more shallow.
Aditya leads me forward through the grass, our crew filming a few paces off to one side. Through my binoculars, I spot three tuskers at the top of the hill, looking down on
their family of female elephants.
“Do you think she’s in there somewhere?” I ask as I watch them grazing and bathing at the water’s edge.
“I don’t know, Goldie.”
I press my binoculars really hard against my face. “Look at that, Aditya! Look at that circle of family. There are aunts and cousins and sisters all together. There’s a lesson there, isn’t there?”
Quietly in my ear, Aditya replies, “Yes, yes, there is.”
“Oh my God!” I cry suddenly, pointing wildly. “Oh my God, Aditya! I think that’s her! I think that’s my elephant! Yes, there she is! Oh, Aditya, there’s my elephant!” My heart is racing. I want to jump up and down and scream. “I see her! There’s that ring around her eye. It’s Belly Button! She’s alive!”
“Shhh! They’ll hear you!”
“But it’s her, Aditya!” I squeal, tears streaming down my face. “Oh my God! It’s Belly Button! I can’t believe it.”
“And do you see anything else?” he asks in his deep voice.
“What? What?”
“Do you see anything under her legs?”
Straining through the binoculars, I see it. A tiny calf, hiding between her legs. “It’s a baby!”
“Yes, a son. Less than a week old.”
“Oh my God! How do you know that?”
“Well, actually, we’ve had a crew out here for weeks. They found her and her child. We wanted to surprise you.”
“You did? Oh my God, I don’t believe it. But I wonder where her other baby is?”
“You see that young elephant by her side?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s her!”
“No! Really? You mean, you knew this all along?”
“Yes, I’m a trickster.” Aditya grins wickedly. “But I didn’t know about the baby until yesterday. That baby was born just as you arrived in Kabini.”
I stare and stare at my elephant’s new calf, her tiny boy. He’s so small that I can sometimes hardly see him as he takes baby steps between the massive tree trunk legs of his family. Just like his sister before him, this new infant will grow up to help act as his mother’s seeing eye, shepherding her through life. My elephant will have another elephant, and that elephant will have another, and so the cycle will continue. The herd will perpetuate.
I feel such deep joy, watching this family taking such good care of each other in times of birth, life and death. Just like my family.
As one, the herd moves to the river to bathe. I watch as the little baby frolics in the water, happily playing, his tiny trunk up like a periscope. His older relatives flank him to protect him from crocodiles. They also take care of the disabled Belly Button, nudging her gently to the riverbank, making sure she doesn’t slip. She has not been cast away because she is useless; instead, she is being helped, assisted and loved.
My knees weakening under me, I slump against a tree stump and watch breathlessly.
“Now do you believe in destiny?” Aditya asks me.
“Yes,” I say emphatically. “Yes, I believe in destiny. I have to. Because in India, anything can happen.”
Not knowing the outcome of an experience can be incredibly humbling and refreshingly liberating. Especially when we have to trust in strangers or lean on them for help and guidance when our course shifts unexpectedly.
We like to think we have things completely under control. We hold on so dearly to the things that define us—our houses, our cars, our clothes, our belongings, and even sometimes our opinions. But when we become lost or are suddenly out of our element, we not only have to face up to the unknown, we have to do it without any of the things around us that we think are important.
If someone had told me how things would start out on that trip to India—that I’d be lost and frightened, or that I’d have to sit on top of a wild elephant—I probably wouldn’t have gone. But I did. That journey provided some of the greatest memories of my life. I learned so much. Mostly, I reminded myself how to surrender to the moment.
Letting go like that reminds us of the simple beauty of play. Children don’t plan. They don’t control. They laugh, they have fun, they go with the flow. There is a lesson for us all there.
Kurt and I go on bicycle trips where we are completely free. We don’t do what many of our fellow cyclists do: get up at dawn, pedal directly from A to B, have dinner and go to bed. We meander. We get lost. We stop at remote farmhouses to ask where we are. We have to try to find our way back, or hope, as darkness descends, that the support truck will eventually find us. It always does. It’s fun to be lost for a while; it’s humbling.
If we can just let go and trust that things will work out the way they’re supposed to, without trying to control the outcome, then we can begin to enjoy the moment more fully. The joy of the freedom it brings becomes more pleasurable than the experience itself.
postcard
Oliver, Kate and Wyatt burst out of our kitchen door in a dead race toward our car.
“I made it first! I’m in the front seat!” calls Ollie.
“No! It’s mine!” Kate hollers back.
Wyatt, six years old, and ten years younger than Oliver, trails along, picking up the rear.
I am still in the kitchen, waiting for the star of the night: my mother, Laura Hawn. It is almost sundown, and we should have left for the synagogue fifteen minutes ago to make the High Holy service.
I smell her heady perfume before she even rounds the turn of the stairs. Celia, our dear housekeeper, holds Mom steady from behind so she doesn’t fall. Her red lipstick is perfectly applied to her once-full lips. Her cheeks are finely dusted with pink blush, and her soupy brown eyes are adorned with a smattering of mascara.
“You look beautiful, Ma.”
“Thanks, honey. Celia did my makeup for me. I can’t see a damn thing anymore.”
Celia beams. There is so much love between them you can almost touch it.
“I could smell you before I could see you.” I laugh. “You smell real good.”
“It’s Shocking.” She smiles, enjoying the pun. I think fondly of the neatly wrapped bottles of perfume my father used to place under the Christmas tree for her each year.
Struggling to put on her coat, Mom looks around the room. “Where are the kids, already? We’ll be late.”
“They’re already in the car, Ma. Let’s go.”
Celia appears from the garage with a wheelchair. Mom’s face drops.
“I hate that damn thing! I don’t need it!”
She was always so independent, always so active. It pains me too that she needs to be pushed around, dependent on the kindness of others. But I have to be practical.
“Well, Mom, let’s bring it along, just in case. It’s a long walk, and maybe you’ll get tired.”
Laura Hawn gives me one of her black looks. Like the ones she used to give to Daddy, or Patti or me when we were bad. Boy, they burn right through you like a hot iron.
Oliver may have won the race to the car, but he is soon dethroned from the front seat when I open the door. Standing with Grandma, I tell him, “In the back, Ol.”
“Oh, let him sit up here,” Mom protests. “I can get in the back.”
“No, Grandma, you sit in the front,” Oliver insists, holding her arm, steadying her for a soft landing.
Katie leans over and touches her grandmother’s hair. “You look so pretty, Gram!”
Mom puts her hand on top of Katie’s. “Thanks, honey. I love you.”
“Love you too, Gram.”
Oliver jumps in the backseat with Katie and Wyatt. The car shakes as Celia slams the trunk shut, securing Mom’s chariot. She waves us off—one grandma, one mom, three children and one wheelchair—as we pull away from our house on a warm September evening. We are on our way to pray to God for forgiveness for our sins. This is Rosh Hashanah, the holiest day of the Jewish year.
We wend our way down Sunset Boulevard. The kids are unusually quiet in the back. I glance furtively over at my mother as she
looks out the window. She has a beatific expression on her face as she watches the hustle and bustle of life beyond her cloistered world. It makes her happy to reconnect to the life outside her four walls.
She had her first heart attack six years ago during the Christmas holiday. They had to perform emergency bypass surgery days later. Patti and I rushed to the hospital. Panicking, we clung to each other and didn’t let go. Dazed, we were both bewildered that this could happen to our strong and willful mother.
We walked into her coldly lit room in the same hospital where Daddy had died. Once again, we heard those horrible beeping machines that he was hooked up to ten years before. This couldn’t be happening, we thought. Not again. Not to Mom. Looking down at her, we tried to act as normally as we could. Hoping to cheer her up, we fixed fake smiles. But, of course, she saw right through us. She could see the fear in our eyes. Nothing gets by Mom.
“Why don’t you both go away now, so you can have a good cry?” she told us. “It’s all right. I know. Go.”
Our bodies stiffened in unison. We both bent down and kissed her. Our tycoon, our sage, our get-it-done mother.
“Okay, Mama.”
Glued together, still holding hands, we went outside to the hallway, grabbed each other and sobbed our pain and fear. Our sorrow flowed between us. We were one.
All these years later and Mom is still with us. But her health is on a downward spiral.
“Where the hell is this place, Goldie? It’s almost dark already.”
Katie spots the sign to the synagogue. “There it is, Mommy.”
I pull up to the entrance and the kids pile out. Wyatt and Kate open Gram’s door and help her out, as Oliver and I manhandle the wheelchair out of the trunk. We struggle together to open it, while Wyatt and Kate hold on to their grandmother from either side, acting as her stanchions.
Oliver takes the wheelchair from me finally and pushes it toward Mom, Indy 500–style, stopping on a dime at her feet.