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Dilemma

I woke up shivering, dreaming that the African sun had disappeared. The sky was darkening quickly, the temperature dropping. Herds of zebra ran amok, their black-and-white stripes bouncing reflections against the glowering clouds. I saw a wildebeest with a broken leg and a disinterested lion not 10 feet from it, sniffing and grunting.

I shook the dream from my head and shuffled off to get coffee, take my meds, wash my face. 

And then I remembered: Art's mom fell and broke her leg Thursday night. I'm dreaming of Africa, and she's breaking things. She's 85 years old, but except for an undiagnosed neuropathy, is healthy as the proverbial mule. With a busted leg. She could live to be 100. And five. Art's her only child. And now she's in a "rehab facility"--read nursing home--with a leg so swollen it'll be four days til they can cast it. 

So, am I the lion to her wildebeest?  

I suddenly feel desperate. How can we plan a trip to Africa--no, not a trip, but a life change--with an old woman dependent on us for practically everything? She lived her life, made her choices, raised her kid, did her ironing and never left the country. Is it fair that we leave her here in the company of her friends while we traipse off to live our lives? She'd never come along--the uncertainty would kill her if the flight didn't. Should she have a choice in the matter? In my heart, I know the answers to these questions.

Coffee cup in hand, drop of Kahlua and a dollop of sweetened condensed milk for flavor, I opened the blinds in the kitchen. 

It was beginning to snow.

Reservations

When it comes to making last-moment reservations, Jenny is a miracle worker. My form of luck involves finding street parking in crowded neighborhoods. Hers comes in arranging the best lodging available, regardless of how long it's been "sold out." She says it's because she retains skills from her days as a travel agent, I say it's something completely different: karma. Juujuu, mojo, luck, it's practically preternatural. 

Christmas is the busy time at Kruger National Park, when people book a year in advance to stay in the camps there. Not only did Jenny arrange lodging over Christmas, she got the range she wanted, luxurious to simple, and she did it two weeks before Christmas, one week before she wanted to depart. And she did it for four people.

Not including us, I'm sorry to say.

We were quite at home in the poor house, thank you very much, having travelled the previous Christmas in So Africa and the one before that in Switzerland, both times with Jenny and her spouse, Charles. 

Art and I can't say enough about traveling with Jenny and Charles; they're as generous, thoughtful and amusing as any traveling companions we could desire. Charles sure took the work out of Switzerland, speaking fluent Swiss-German as he does. The traveling is easy, but at the end of each day, we end up in the most charming place you can imagine, thanks to Jenny's magic.

I could tell you how we marched, roomless, into Zermatt, Switzerland--knowing full well that Zermatt was fully booked at Christmas--but Jenny had a theory, one that worked. And so, next morning, we left well rested and full of breakfast fit for mountaineers. The real joy came in the surprise that our cozy rooms, in a town where there was no room, overlooked the Matterhorn on a crystal clear evening and a brilliant morning.

But this is about Africa, not Switzerland.

Magically populated by the charming terra cotta people and creatures pulled from a local Venda woman's imagination, Lesheba is a desolate mountain resort way up the narrow track of a red clay road in the Soutpansberg mountains of South Africa. The artist, now world-famous, is Noira Mabasa and sculpting is her game. She sculpts giant cows, tiny lizards, old men, pregnant women, snakes and rhinos, giraffes and mythical critters, whatever, and drops them, an unseen god, into their surroundings. I've been lucky to stay in her marvelous Venda Village twice, thanks to Jenny's magic.

If you book the Venda Village, a tidy cluster of nine huts guarded by Mabasa's statues, you get the entire place to yourself. That's what makes it so magic: the solitude. How is it that Jenny booked us there at Christmas, two separate years?

I don't know, but I'm not asking.

Photo Credit

OK OK 

Art nagged me til I agreed: photo credit where photo credit is due. Some of these are his (the lion licking herself), some are Jenny's and some are mine. Same with those yet to come. Just don't ask who took what cause I'd like to take credit for all.

That's just like me, too, wanting credit for every good thing that comes to me: lasting friends, a charming spouse, a cute and cozy cottage of a home, one adventure after another. 

I'm lucky.

What more could I ask, except that Art assign his photos to me, give me some credit I don't deserve?

Biltong

A year ago, we returned home, laden with stuff: touristy salad scoopers carved into wild animal shapes, beaded keychains, cheap batiks that looked like a million bucks, shopping bags printed with animal hide or ecological messages, jewelry made from ostrich egg shells. And biltong. 

Biltong, that luscious game jerky explicitly banned from import into the United States, for fear of what? Contamination of the game market here? Addicts questing for more, more different, more exotic, whatever? It hardly gets more exotic than kudu or crocodille biltong.

Biltong is: shape, texture, aroma, taste. So different from our jerky. I'm rarely at a loss for words, but since the day the lions made me give up vegetarianism, I've loved biltong so much I can call it heavenly and leave it at that.  

But I can't leave it, just like that, so I prepare to smuggle, er, import it to the States. I triple-wrap it in plastic and mine my luggage with it. I'm not confident the plastic will stay the biltong-sniffing dogs at the airport on the US side, so I leave a few unmentionable garments discreetly unwashed, hoping to throw the dogs off.  

At the Johannesburg airport, a huge sign, in red capital letters, declares, "DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CARRY BILTONG INTO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA." 

I turn my chin down and pretend not to see it.  Art doesn't know I'm carrying biltong. If I go down for the crime, I didn't want him to take a rap. (hahah and too many cop shows for me.) He doesn't love biltong the fanatical way I do and would declare this entire mission a bust long before I got busted.

I lug my suitcase to the counter and hoist it onto the scale.

"One kilo over," says the official smuggly. 

"What?" panic rises in my throat.

"One kilo over. You must remove one kilo."

"Uh. What will I do with it?"

"I do not care. One kilo must be removed."

Up until that very instant, I believed that "African time" was a racist tag. How quickly we change our values.

I pull my suitcase off the scale, step aside and slowly proceed to undo the latches. That's when a man, someone I don't know, approaches the official. Just loud enough for the official and me to hear, he purrs, "This is a tourist in our country, an influential one. Leave the kilo." And he presses a bill--a surprisingly small denomination--into the official's hands.

Next thing I know, I'm clutching my boarding pass. My rescuer disappears into the crowd and I never see him again.

During the longest commercial flight  in the world, 18 hours to New York, I almost forget about the biltong and the ferocious rottweilers that would be my fate. Even coach aboard South African Airlines seems plushy. The food is amazingly continental and the attendants are exactly that. They prowl the cabin while you sleep and will cover your feet with one of those fleecy blankets if your toes stick out. They're prompt to answer the bell if you get thirsty in the night.

One thing they do just might save me from slavering dog jaws. They give you biltong as a midnight snack. It comes in a little vacuum-sealed packet, about an ounce of it. Art's not interested and neither is the woman across the aisle. But I am. Score three ounces of biltong for me. 

As we approach New York, I rip open the packets and stuff them into the outer pocket of my carry-on bag. As soon as we collect our luggage and step into that big room where the cops saunter through with the dogs, my panic is nearly palpable. All this for a couple pounds of biltong? Am I crazy? Maybe that'll be my defense...

I'm trying oh so hard to be casual, that I nearly jump out of my skin when I feel a damp, cold nose against my leg. I look down into the sweet wet eyes of a little white dog, the cross between a dust mop and a wig. I cannot help it, I start to laugh. So does the cop. For a moment. The little dog goes nuts, sniffing and pawing my carry-on.

"Whatcha got there," he asks. "Airplane biltong?"

I pull a packet out, apologize, "Oh gosh, I forgot. Want it?"  Try to hand it to him. 

He refuses, shakes his head, "Thanks. I don't care for it."

And smiling down at his pretty little dog, he moves off. 

I'm so pale Art notices.

"You OK?

 

"Yes," I lie.  "Just tired," and that's the truth.

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.