Adrenaline

Once, I was so close breeding rhinos I could have reached out and counted coup on their armored backs. The huge male stopped for an instant and shot me a myopic glare, sensing my fear and excusing my intrusion. He didn't have time to charge me, for mating rhinos generally have eyes for one thing and one thing only--each other. 

Don't take my word on rhino behavior, however. Close proximity to locomotive-sized animals--mating ones, no less--jolted me with such a healthy dose of adrenaline it still pulses through my veins. 

In an SMS from South Africa the other day, my friend Jenny says it's 39C--that's 102.2F to you and me. She's roasting her way across Kruger National Park; I'm freezing my ass off at home, where it's 11F and cold crystals glisten off the snow like coals in a fire. 

Jenny tells us in her ever-so-brief SMS, that she survived a black rhino charge one day ("scary") and an elephant stampede the next ("very scary"). She says nothing more, leaves no details. Nothing. 

I scratch through some of my own animal stories, wishing they could compare with an elephant charge.  Most the animals I encountered in three visits to South Africa were tepid, going about their own business in much better temper than pissed-off elephants.  The baboons scared me somewhat, until something made me brave. I certainly recognized danger in the lions, and a big snake, still unidentified, and the humungous spiders, and the hippos, when I saw how fast they could run. But the elephants grazed quietly through groves, never charging, barely aware we were there. 

We don't experience enough adrenaline in our society. We forget what it's for.

Once, late at night, I sat in a jeep with some other Americans and watched lions kill and devour a yearling wildebeest. We sat shocked into silence by the horrors illuminated by our red-filtered spotlights. The blood, the savagery, the snarling snapping quarrels held us transfixed until, in one single moment, the lionly squabbling subsided. In that open space of relative silence, a human sound erupted from the jeep. 

My stomach growled. 

Forget the urge to fight or fly, witnessing the slaughter made me hungry. 

Crocodile

I'm standing on a point overlooking the Olifants River. Far, far below, on a wide spit of gravel, a fat crocodile basks. He's the only crocodile I've encountered, and I like the distance, thank you very much. I guess he's a giant, because at this distance he appears to be 4 inches long. 

I content myself to watch through my binoculars because, for some reason, I can't learn to carry my camera everywhere I go. Even here in Africa, where every shot is a unique shot, I sometimes leave it. Interestingly enough, those photos I miss take up residence in my brain, coming up in sharper focus than any digital photo I bring to this 24-inch screen.

And so I watch that croc pretend to sleep. In actuality, his focused eye watches a giraffe lead her young along the opposite bank. I can't believe she doesn't see him. She seems to have let her guard down, munching the fresh, green vegetation that grows on the river bank, showing her baby the delectable bits.

The croc remains motionless, even as the giraffes step into the river and begin to wade.

Confusion

In Lesheba Wilderness, high up on the border of South Africa and Zimbabwe, lives a wildebeest who thinks he's a zebra. A few years ago, you could see him gazing out from the huddle of wildebeests into the tangle of zebra, longing, it seemed, to join that striped lot. So it seemed natural for him to switch allegiance with his instincts when, tail twitching, hooves stamping, he invited himself to stay with them.

For some reason, they accepted him and now he never looks toward the wildebeests the way he once did to the zebras.

The people who live around there don't seem bothered at all that this wild thing should be so confused. They've seen it all before, and withhold judgment on matters involving wild things. Yet I'm morbidly fascinated. Why--and how--could the wildebeest decide so securely that he was, like a transexual, born into the wrong body?

Animal Planet footage showed how, unbelievably, a lioness adopted a baby bok of some sort. She groomed it, shielded it from the sun, herded it gently back when it strayed too far. She couldn't feed it, of course, so we watched it grow thinner over the few days the camera followed. It was a mercy when, once she turned her back for just a moment, the dominant male lion snatched that baby. As nature intended, he devoured it. The staggered adoptive mother circled and cried for her baby, just beyond reach of her mate's claws. 

The naturalist who followed this lioness through the course of a season told us that she adopted at least five more bok babies, losing them to starvation and predation before disappearing herself. 

What's any of that got to do with me?

I'm confused.

Camps

Sirheni. Shingdwezi. Letabo. Camps in Kruger. Luxury tents. Huts. Cozy little cottages. 

You sleep deeply under the stars, no tablets necessary, the long day wavering far behind you. The lion's bark pierces your dreams; you stir, roll, sock the pillow, sleep again without really waking.

In the morning, it's 17 degrees, ice merengue glistens on the lawn, a skin of ice covers the pond.

The dream of Africa fades; all you remember is smiling in your sleep. 

The floor is freezing. It's time to scrape the ice off the car. You can dream of the veldt another time, another night.

Characters

South Africa, that gem of my memory, paces me, taunts me, calls. The place-names swirl: Kruger, Bloemfontein, Hoedspruit, Cape Town. Characters that live there whisper to me: come. Little white school girls dressed as angels fly before my eyes. I think, why are they dressed that way midsummer? I forget too easily--it's December--and for a brief moment I miss the snow that blankets my home.

But now, another December, I'm homesick for the veldt, the sweet air, the feel of the golden light as the sun sets, quickly as it does there, its rays bouncing off a lion's mane. He, the one we call Big Black, is so far in the distance he seems like a mirage. 

He's no mirage--I saw him mating. 

As it goes, it lasted three or four days, with him eying her every 15 minutes, lightly kissing her behind the ear, growling, biting, mounting. She rolls into him, vocalizing sweetly. Almost before it begins, it's over. She throws him off, swats him, lies back to snooze. Maybe she dreams of delicious little white angels.

Crazy

I feel frantic. First we hatched this plan, now we seem paralyzed to implement it; there's just too much to do. Bitten by that gigantic bug called South Africa, we can't back out. Everyone we know knows we're going. And so the plans grow richer, but the immobility feels like a mushroom, the biggest organism on earth.

We have so much to get rid of, accumulated junk good for used book shops, garage sales, and "antique" stores. And that's the good stuff. Then there are cars, furniture, tiller we used one season.

We must sell the house, and in this economy. That means we paint, perform the most basic cosmetic surgery on the place we let get too saggy since its last operation. Almost everything is wrong with this 1938 bungalow. The least we can do is rake remaining leaves from our garden, pick them out of the pond, that best, most wonderful feature of our yard. It's our own little pan, a drinking hole not unlike those scattered across the wilds of Africa, where hundreds of birds in dozens of varieties come to drink, bathe, rest. 

I get the Tory Peterson guide and flip through the pages. We'll have to learn all new birds, all differently challenging, in ZA, but we're good at that. It's one of our hobbies, one of the many many things we do so well together. 

But as I'm browsing Peterson and thinking about nothing, really, Art comes in and takes a bunch of books off the shelf.  "As far as I'm concerned," he says, stacking them neatly on the floor, "we can get rid of these." 

I agree because I think we can get rid of all of them. I therefore keep this tiny revelation to myself: It's a small stack, six books out of hundreds, and they are all .... mine.