(dave e)

weather cue

a few weeks ago, ryan rightly (and poignantly) marked a climatalogical reminder.

i'm having one of those today. but mine's not so chilling, just nostalgic.

clear, 58 degrees, a bit windy. today's weather has put my fidgety brain back in an open-air range rover, bumping along the dry road beds around kruger national park in south africa. lucky does not begin to explain my experience. i'll spare any reader a detailed travel narrative; it's been over a year, anyway, so chronology and cohesion are fuzzy, but i do remember moments. waiting for thousands of cape buffalo to open up a space on the road. utterly unnerving eye contact with troop-leading baboon. the superloud growl of a leopard jumping out of the brush a few yards from our range rover. the rumble of a passing elephant at night. jackal noise in the wee hours. the resounding crack of a giraffe femur in the jaws of a snacking lion.

an october day in washington is almost as potent a mental cue for memories of that trip as the visits to photo albums and maps that it stimulates.

yeah, so, with weather like this, in a south african winter, i followed natalie to the southern african wildlife college, where she executed a workshop she had planned. after a week at the college (whose "campus" is a pretty large collection of thatch-roof buildings surrounded by a fence in the midst of an enormous preserve owned by the college -- there is no fence between the college land and kruger), she and i (and a conservationist friend) drove ourselves around kruger for a few days, and the two of us celebrated our first anniversary with a few nights at umlani bushcamp (which, despite all of its "essence of africa" and "yesteryear" rhetoric, immediately became my favorite place on earth), in the timbavati preserve.

i'm fully conscious of the fact that those two days of "africa" at a private reserve were very much a vacationer's packaged view of wildlife, and i heard no end of the fact that our rental-car drive through s africa proper, outside of park fences and private reserves, was a tour of infinitely more "developed" country than any other african nation's population. still, that drive, on a chill morning, past nondescript concrete buildings, roadside trash, and the endless collection of people who seem to just be walking with no destination, is part of my memory, too.

some other time, i'll try to write about my "authentic" african experience, which had to do with a trip to the local bank. the most striking plot elements: a high-powered rifle and my a-c-u-t-e unease with its presence.

i'm not upset about the very recent return of heat in our apartment (whoo!), but i do sort of miss the feeling of cold dry air chilling my ears as i listened to rumbling elephants.

Posted by dave at October 3, 2003 3:30 PM | TrackBack