Living the Landscape
by Cindy Carlson
From the Wayfarer Archive, 2015
“For me, the natural world in all its evolutionary splendor is a revelation of the divine.” Alison Hawthorne Deming
The weathered Land Rover shuddered to a stop. Our driver, gazing ahead, raised his right hand then lowered it slowly through the stuffy air, a clear signal for quiet. He had spotted something ahead. I slid my legs up onto the worn vinyl seat, grabbed the back with one hand, hoisted myself into a crouch, then cautiously stretched up through the opening in the roof.
A soft breeze surprised me, sweet with acacia and a distant rain, chilling the tiny halo of sweat beads along my hairline. The Masai Mara spread to the edge of my vision, vast as an ocean, pale green and umber, swaying in the slow undulations of a sea at rest.
Then I spied them—rugged gray boulders the size of small dump trucks, strewn along the rutted road, two hundred yards ahead. I raised my binoculars. The shapes were moving.
“Elephants!” I whispered.
Rich popped up beside me. At 6’3” my husband could peer over the roof without standing on the seat. The other four passengers poked their heads out the side windows, necks elongated, staring ahead, as a dozen African bush elephants advanced on a slow-motion collision course with our vehicle.
The massive bodies swayed. With each footstep their dense, deeply furrowed coats sagged and trembled. The lead animal, the largest cow, paused three jeep lengths from us. Her giant tent-flap ears, pinned back for movement, fanned out to full size, then slapped back with a leathery crrraack against the columns of her shoulders.
No one breathed.
The elephant raised one front foot and, without another glance toward us, lumbered off the path into the tall grass, the herd slowly easing in line behind her. Only then could we clearly see the three Babar-sized babies carefully wedged among the adults. The silent parade filed past the jeep and on across the plain; only the soft swish of tails and grasses lingered in the air.
Then we breathed.
For thirty minutes every Sunday evening in our 1960s western New York household there was no disagreement about what to watch on television. Throughout the week, Daddy chose Red Skelton, Lawrence Welk and the Friday night fights; Mom, when she escaped the kitchen, claimed only holiday parades and the symphony; my brother, if he was ever home, watched the occasional sporting event; my little sister was still under the spell of the Huckleberry Hound crew. As a young teen, I was immersed in the lives of the flashy detectives who spilled from the Sunset Strip and Waikiki beach into my fantasies. But Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the seminal nature documentary, would draw all of us to the living room, fanned out across the floor and couches, while Marlin Perkins, sharp in his pressed khaki jacket, brought the thrill of safari into our tiny living room. In his affable style (“Oh look, here comes the mother gorilla . . .”), he made the exploration of ocean, jungle, and savanna seem possible. I dreamed of the day I would be the one whispering behind a long camera lens trained on a pair of rough-housing lion cubs or a snarling gorilla.
My father, a science teacher and an easy-going practical man, held three irrefutable truths: the preciousness of family, the literal interpretation of the Bible, and the sanctity of nature. To ingrain in us his familial and religious principles, he relied on personal example and the teachings of his church. To impart his values about nature, he took us outside.
One cold June morning when I was ten, we huddled in the marshy area at the edge of Red House Lake in Allegheny State Park—sneakers squishing in the muck, dangling a string of thermometers into the frigid water—to learn how living things survive in their own place in an ecosystem. I knew the term ecology before I reached my teens, long before it emerged in the popular parlance.
On a late autumn night, Dad roused my sis and me from our toasty beds for a walk up our country road to witness the Northern Lights, then back down the frosty hill coaxing us to say aurora borealis. There were sunrise field trips to discover birds and backyard feeders to bring them close, hikes through the deep northern woods to identify trees and early spring wildflowers, and compost piles to churn up dark, rich soil that he would hold proudly in his hand while proclaiming one of his favorite laws of physics, “Matter can be neither created nor destroyed.” To live out that concept, he recycled everything.
A dutiful student, I soaked up my father’s teachings, and when I told him, just a few years before he died, that Rich and I were going to Kenya on a birding and wildlife safari, he was as excited as if the trip were his own.
Our bush plane had lifted us that morning up over the ridge of the Rift Valley—a panorama so wide it can be recognized from outer space—and on across the Masai Mara where we rattled more than an hour, peering down on sweeping savanna crisscrossed with deep-rut tracks and checkered with roaming animal herds. At the “airport” (a mowed landing strip and a wind sock), a half-dozen jeeps and vans were lined up, like pets at the pound, to bounce us through miles of windswept landscape to Mara River Camp, one of a few private tent camps on the Mara National Reserve. Only the occasional acacia tree and our elephant encounter had interrupted the endless vista.
Don, owner of the jeep and the camp, greeted us at the entrance to the compound. A hefty South African with a shock of red hair and a ruddy face, he studied African wildlife most of his life and was working on a field guide to the 600-plus birds of Kenya. He was reputed to have the ability to glimpse a sparrow-sized blur whizzing past a speeding van and instantly identify it from among 30 or 40 possible tiny brown birds.
First came the warnings: keep food out of the tents; don’t walk anywhere on the property at night without an armed guard; and, most importantly, respect the animals in the wild. Then a few stories about death on safaris all around us—a charging water buffalo, a flash flood in a stream-bed, a monkey bite that left a man quarantined for rabies and AIDS.
I shivered. Animals in the wild. I was in Africa.
Alison Hawthorne Deming, exploring her evolution as a nature writer in her memoir Writing the Sacred Into the Real, says, “ . . . all of my life I have hungered for wild places and all my life wild places have fed me and that is central to who I am . . .”
My favorite haunt growing up was a deciduous woods extending north from my parents’ backyard for a half mile on both sides of the road until it merged into farmland. The woods was lush and healthy, dominated by mixed hardwoods with a stand of hemlock where a stream ran through. A small clan of elementary school-aged kids—warriors, explorers, Indians, detectives—roamed its underbrush, through the changing temperatures of its air currents, scuffling through musty, decomposing leaves, stalking squirrels or adventures or mysteries. By age ten, allowed to explore on my own, I would return again and again to a giant red oak towering over a clearing that rolled for a mile down the hillside. A scarlet tanager called above me, rasping like a robin with a sore throat, and I could peer up through the web of leaves to discover his brilliant red breast. We were learning poetry in school and I stood, my back to the trunk, trying to project my tiny fifth-grade voice down the slopes as I recited, I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree . . . then shrunk to the mossy ground from the sudden truth of it.
Nature, lodged in my soul at an early age, became my touchstone. In college I struggled to identify a major as my heart called me to biology so that I could be outside, but my intuition questioned my temperament for the time in the lab. Wild, for me, had a personal, fluid definition. I sought the accidental intrusion of nature into urban life, like a peregrine falcon swooping down the concrete canyon of a city block or finches congregating on thistle in a vacant lot. As a young adult I read and re-read Wild America—ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher’s 30,000-mile odyssey around the continent—and dreamed of retracing their route, but settled for what William Least-Heat Moon calls the “blue highways” that wander the map toward small towns or promises of a park or a forest. As my sights and resources expanded, wild also became a campfire and pup tent high in the Great Smokies, howler monkeys in the tangled jungle of Belize, dawn atop the ruins of Palenque, and the hissing of beluga whales in the Hudson Bay. Wild places indeed fed me—a rich and nourishing potion that sustained me through indoor times.
Our tent, set on a wooden slab and perched on the bank of the Mara River, had headroom enough for Rich to stand, two steel cots, a small dresser and a walkway down the center leading to an attached bathroom at the rear. The light tan canvas ruffled in the breeze.
“No fear of roughing it here,” I said to Rich as I flopped onto the cot.
Suddenly, a full-nosed snort exploded nearby as though a giant congested beast was announcing his arrival. The echo rippled through the walls. I sprang from the cot, back into the center of the tent. Another snort, closer and almost deafening. Then another.
“What the hell!” Rich ran to the front flap.
The river was chock-full of hippos. Massive, blubbery creatures chomping, exhaling, thumped through the water like bumper cars. A camp worker stood on the bank, his long legs skinny as the giant stick he wielded.
“Hippo stick,” he said, glancing at our puzzled expressions and shaking his weapon as a warning. “Very mean, these boys.”
Night fell. The Maasai workers constructed a hippo-sized bonfire of acacia limbs in the round stone pit under the bowl of black sky, and we pulled a small circle of camp chairs tight around the slow-burning blaze. Behind us a chorus of croaking frogs formed an outer ring.
“Bushbaby!” Don whispered, shining his flashlight toward a small, squirrel-like animal slinking up a nearby feeder. The light caught two flame-red saucers, wild and wide as though frozen in fright. “The only thing more frightening than those eyes is his scream,” he warned. “You’ll probably hear it in the night.”
I stepped back from the circle; the sweet acacia smoke followed me. There was no light at all between the fire and the heavens. Only the unnerving sky—the immensity of it humbling, almost painful to look at, or forbidden, like staring into the sun.
I followed the smoke trail back to my childhood when everything in the world, from the sky on down, felt huge and unknown and I stared into the darkness of my bedroom and tried to make sense of the things my father had taught me. The questions dogged me—Why am I here? Where do I go when I am done being here? What about matter being neither created nor destroyed? Why would God be so wasteful as to create all those people souls and animal souls only to burn them in hell? Surely He had invented recycling. It made little sense not to apply the concept to living creatures.
Rich handed me a beer, and we sipped, long past bedtime, staring into the flames; the Mara was the kind of place, at least that night, for pondering life. Then, slightly numb and ready to face the sky, we stumbled off to the tent, the soft padding of the barefoot guard, armed with bow and arrow, a few paces behind us.
Floating in swirling darkness. A line of babies. They’re lost. And burning. And screaming. An ungodly, hideous scream. I jerked bolt upright on the creaking cot, my heart hammering, and swung my feet toward the floor. In an instant I recognized: I’m in a tent on the Masai Mara in the middle of the night—not a good idea to put my feet on the floor. I looked over to Rich’s cot to see his face pale in the dim light.
“So that’s what a bushbaby sounds like,” he said. “I wish I had a tape recorder.”
The tiny mammal above our tent fell silent. I drifted back into a fitful sleep, separated by a thin canvas from thrashing hippos and, in the distance, a shrieking hyena.
We were out before sunrise for the first game drive. I claimed my spot in the jeep—feet on the seat, elbows on the roof, drinking in the wide, pale dawn. A lone lion strode through the grass, returning from the night’s hunt, his powerful body and untamed mane a soft golden brown in the early light. The other animals gave him wide berth. “S-s-s-simba,” our driver said with a smile.
We came upon mixed herds of zebra and antelope. Skittish, they moved together on instinct like schools of fish. The topi stood apart, regal and still, their front legs longer than the rear ones as though pausing from a climb up the non-existent hills. Giraffes loped along the thickets, so close we could watch the oxpeckers working their way up and down the long fuzzy necks. And secretary birds, almost my height if I had joined them, strutted like fussy divas in the open spaces, kicking up miniature dust clouds that glinted in the sun.
Four young Maasai carrying long sticks and wrapped in shukas—the mud-red blankets typical of local apparel—trotted through our field of view. Fierce warriors, they live alongside the wild animals of the Serengeti but pose no threat to them; the Maasai people subsist only on their cattle. Like the previous day’s elephant herd, these warriors followed a determined course from somewhere to somewhere else, guided by signs in the Mara invisible to us outsiders in the jeep. They disappeared over a slight ridge, seemingly without fear, confident of their place in the local food chain.
With the equatorial sun at its peak, I stared through my camera lens at a cheetah resting motionless in the shade. She was bigger than I expected, her paws the size of my running shoes. Distinctive black lines curved down the sides of her face, ending in a pair of teardrops. If hungry or startled, she could accelerate from that resting position to sixty miles per hour in a couple of seconds. But she lay still, with only the slightest blink of her eyelids, despite the click of my camera.
We discovered a zebra lying on its side, head raised and tail twitching, the skin of its belly ripped away, entrails exposed and releasing an acid stench into the air. I felt queasy at first and turned away, but was drawn back to stare, imagining the jaws of the lion soon to be tearing into the flesh.
By the third day I was living a landscape—feeling its pulse as it played out in multiple dimensions before me, reveling in what Peter Matthiessen called a “glimpse of the earth’s morning.” Animals moved in profound harmony with their environment; I heard them and smelled them and sensed them. If not for the body of the Land Rover, I would have been eaten by them. At some deep place in my gut, I knew their fear. The Mara was a world laid bare, reduced to the essentials of water, food and shade. I slipped into its dreamlike rhythm, unaware of anything but the animals, the rolling plains and the unrelenting sky.
Nights in the tent there was no more pondering the meaning of existence. I tiptoed to Rich’s cot, wanting to feel skin and muscle and bone. And to drown out the screams of the African night.
Last morning on the Mara, waiting to board the plane, a woman who had been there a week wandered, camera in hand, down a path for one last picture.
“Stop!” Don shrieked, like someone whose child is heading into traffic. “Do not take another step.” His voice was shrill and commanding. Two Maasai drivers, armed with sticks, hurried to escort her, baffled, back onto the plane.
Take-off was effortless; the aircraft banked, allowing us one long last fix on the tiny crowd below. And just beyond, no more than a plane’s length from where the woman had strayed, a pride of lions sprawled in the tall grass.
I never challenged my father on his sacred truths. I tried only to redefine them, to cherry-pick the parts that worked for me. He knew I inherited his uncompromising admiration for nature and devotion to family. It was in doctrine that I silently struggled. As a child in that dozing time before sleep, I finally resolved the heaven/hell versus ecology dilemma by “inventing” reincarnation, secretly comforted by a realization that souls would live long after a body was discarded, appearing again and again, throughout time, in all of their recycled iterations.
Growing older, I turned again to nature to understand my role as a conscious being within a giant ecosystem, a thread in the web. Those early Wild Kingdom episodes taught me the exquisite balance of nature; wandering the woods taught me humility.
But it was being in the wild in Africa—the land where the first human sojourn began—that completed my anthologized theology. Long before I placed myself in its landscape, I knew it in a holy part of myself where all of life is connected. Long after I visited, when the animals and the vast savanna existed only in my slideshow and my dreams, I knew I had experienced the divine. I came away knowing, more deeply, my place in that living, interconnected organism of life on earth.
Cindy grew up in the snowbelt of western New York, and, when not traveling and birding with her husband, has spent most of her adult life along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. After a long career in youth development, publishing in numerous professional journals, she is spending retirement with her first love—creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Birding, The Quotable, Litro NY, damselfly press, Lowestoft Chronicle and Eclectica.