Kiangazi

August and September, 2009

"Do you suffer from what a French paleontologist called 'the distress that makes human will suffer daily under the crushing number of living things and stars'? For the world is as glorious as ever, and exalting, but for credibility's sake, let's start with the bad news."

-- Annie Dillard For The Time Being

The sky keeps filling with clouds. A goose down comforter shields this piece of Earth from its sun and one giant fish-belly cloud hangs low and swollen. We shiver. How can these clouds not bring rain?

This drought is the worst that anyone can remember. It has draped the landscape in zebra pelts and lain them out like the watches of Salvador Dali. Stripes melt. Faces seep into the ground, baring a toothy grimace. Innards writhe with maggots. Cows, calves, wildebeast, elephant, buffalo. They are dying in droves. Forget sleeping holes and water holes, you could map this place by its dying and dead, pushpins marking the intersection of space and time. What is the distance between corpse and carcass when the scavengers are full? Stay braced, my friend, for it is around the corner and underfoot. Scientists counted over 3000 wildebeast carcasses and teh World Food Program got an emergency infusion of cash. Open water is contaminated by death if not illusory. Ungulates, born to run, now only run in place, fallen down and pawing the dust. Tracing and retracing, a halo of dying effort is recorded at the base of their hooves. They are schoolkids making snow angels.

I am beginning to wonder who is dosing my morning coffee because, god help me, this is a very bad trip.

Even some baboons--famous for their ability to make do--have dropped dead and so have their infants. Drought conditions are not required for significant infant mortality, but this year's must surely be worse. One mother three-legged hobbled and carried her Raggedy Anne for days, long loose legs combing the ground and head lolled back. Another carried and groomed her dead infant until it was flat as a pancake and dry as a bone. A baboon cracker. A very thin wafer that might pair nicely with caviar or brie. By then she could carry it conveniently in her mouth, up the tree, down the tree, and across the plain. Still another mother lost not only her infant, but its body too. There she was that morning, alone, heaving deep, repetitive, distance-traveling "lost calls." I found her one week later, still calling lost.

Am I boring you with tales of dust and suffering? Another drought in Africa. How cliche.

What did I expect, what with nature red in tooth and claw? Protracted and gratuitous suffering has never really been my cup of tea. Still, I can stomach the pain that accommodates death and dying and can even kill when necessary. But I have a thing for symmetry. Mantles and shelves, nooks and crannies, bookends and tabletops, living and dying.

This asymmetry is under my skin.

Ndugu Yangu

21 July, 2009

This is that year. This is that year that the long rains failed and all the cattle died.

But the rain gauges have not been bone dry. Baboons sip from puddles and pools while grass shoots form scanty patches of unearthly green. Looks like someone found an old photograph of Amboseli from the era of the hand-tinted photograph, from back when cheeks were rosy and grass was green. Or maybe God is bored and got his hands on a bottle of antifreeze.

I ask my friend John to define failed rains. This is it, he says. They have failed miserably and completely. The season for long rains has passed and the short rains won't begin until November.

I live in a camp with one woman and five men inside a camp with one woman and countless men. I have learned the expression "ndugu yangu." My brother. Just like real brothers, Nkii and Moonyoi aim sling shots in my direction and pretend they will beat me. Unlike real kin, we have almost no shared experiences. We surprise each other.

They are going to walk their cattle from here to Nairobi?

They are not impressed by my father's four wives. What they cannot believe is that he had
them one at a time!

I am as surprised when they ask as they are when I answer that, yes, white people tell lies
too.

They cock their heads toward the radio, listening to KBC-Maasai. What is the news? Maasai from all over Kenya are calling in to say their cattle are dying. Moonyoi tells me, "after ng'ombe, watu." After cattle, people. These cattle are Maasai currency and now they are also canaries in the mineshaft. I find Nkii alone in the kitchen, head bowed with one hand on the radio, and I know he is praying for rain. Moonyoi suspects that the drought is God's punishment for Kenya's political misdeeds and wonders if it rains in the US.

The landscape is dotted with cattle carcasses in various stages of decomposition and the volume of the stench is increasing. Every time the baboons turn around there are cattle. Big lumbering herds of the tired and hungry walking dead. God put down his antifreeze, picked up the corners of this dusty picnic blanket, and all the world's cows came tumbling down.

I walk with the baboons for over an hour this morning. Pressed from behind by a wall hundreds of cattle wide, they cannot stop to groom or to forage. My work depends on still images of still baboons, but they are not still. So I give up. I stop walking and watch the wave of baboons recede as another bigger, stronger wave of cattle rolls in from behind.

I sit down, peel a banana, and wonder how that bull has the strength to hold up his horns.

Guts

Art is long. Life is short. -Studs Terkel

2 April, 2009

A slick sheet lining my guts really crossed the line. It slipped through the right inguinal canal and formed a pocket filled with mysterious contents, an unnoticed trespass, until it was noticed. Surgical repair was scheduled.

What we in the states call an operating room, Kenyans refer to as "the theater," so I enjoyed an afternoon in..."the theatah". I fasted before surgery because I am an obedient patient. When Dr. Nganga, the anaesthetist, slid the needle into my arm 15 hours after my last meal, he asked what I would like to dream about while sleeping.

"Spaghetti," I said.

Those of us with a uterus also have round ligaments with which to suspend it and when Surgeon Mogere pressed down with a scalpal, he found one of mine out that should have been in, tucked these parts back where they belong, and closed the incision.

That week we also removed similar parts from no-longer-living bodies of some Amboseli baboons.

Humans and wildlife life in close quarters here and drought conditions pull them in even closer. Many living things here are right now going hungry. The Maasai cattle are slow and weakened by starvation and everything on them that can reduce, does. Their hooves are becoming disproportionate to skin and bones, so that a herd walking toward you looks like a bedraggled troupe of vaudevillians in platform shoes.

But the truth is they are on the verge of death. Driving back to camp means passing a young boy standing over a dying heifer, trying to beat the life back into her. Or past a little girl next to one dead cow and one more dying. "Will someone help me lift my cow?" Neither child is much larger than one of the dying animals' legs but even two grown men cannot convince the cow that it is worth it to stand.

Zebras get stuck in the swamp and are too exhausted to move. Their heads surrender to gravity and they drown standing up. Elephants look like paint-drenched canvas draped over an incomplete scaffold.

It is bad and the baboons are hungry. Untended young goats fall easy prey to male baboons who have developed a taste for meat. Lost livestock means lost livelihood for the Maasai and so full blown attacks of were launched. Because big meat-eating males have the strength to escape, the heaviest toll fell on females with infants.

We worked through the night until 3 AM. This was an opportunity--uninvited and unwelcome--to collect tissue samples.

"Heart, liver, kidney, lung, ovaries, adrenals?"

"Check."

Surgeons use a nylon mesh patch to repair an inguinal hernia, so I am now nylon-fortified. New and improved. Extra strength. This patch will stay forever and, over time, my own tissues will swallow it. Years from now another surgeon would never even know it was there.

Folks around here sure are hoping for rain. Folks are hoping this year will not be that one year that the long rains failed, that year that all the cattle died. And while bones of dead baboons are underground being stripped of their muscle and collagen, I am getting on with the business of laying down more.

In Memorium. A.H.H.

21 January, 2009

I am standing on a sun-bleached Nature stage watching "red in tooth and claw" unfold. Male baboons have two particular habits that I could do without. First, they launch full-scale attack on all cycling females when another social group (i.e. new males) is within sight. It really must be frankly stated that they beat the shit out of those ladies. Second, some males have developed a taste for the flesh of other mammals. It is now the birthing season for many ungulates, so I am regularly witness to the horrors of being eaten alive.

Unlike the attacks on females, which males perform with an impressive commitment, the meat-eaters seem initially ambivalent. It is as if they recognize a general impulse, slow to decode its specific command. Days after my arrival here, I watched Liberty three-legged hobble with a baby hare nestled in the crook of one hand. He stopped, snuggled the stone still hare to his chest, and sat for a while before starting in on his meal. Toes first.

Thompsons ("Tommy") and Grants gazelles and their young are plentifull here. They seem as unaware of their role as prey as the baboons are of theirs as predator. When a spindly-legged newborn Tommy cupped its ears toward the baboons, I muttered shamelessly under my breath, "Run away! They are going to eat you!" The mother and the rest of the herd meandered nearby, apparently unalarmed, until it was too late. By the end of the hour, those spindles pumped tree-top air until Njugu had finished the work of splaying it inside out over a thick acacia branch, pulling out endless guts hand over bloody hand, and slurping them up like saucy spaghetti.

Death to baboon prey is just an inevitable consequence of being eaten.

The Amboseli Baboon Research Project is here as a guest of the Maasai community, a pastoralist people who eat more meat than the baboons do. These days I take comfort in their skill with a blade, grateful for their unflinching ability to kill. When they cut the throat of last weekend's dinner goat, her suffering must have been mercifully brief. This goat feast was a gift to everyone in camp and not one ounce of her went uneaten; head, hooves, liver, stomach...down the hatch. The day after the feast we were still drinking belly-fat goat-head soup. The person who paid for the goat was thanked over and over through happy slurpings and smacking lips. They are getting used to my particular brand of strangeness, so only chuckled when I gulped down my own cup of soup and said, "actually, I thank the goat."

Naja pallida (RIP) and Python natalensis

1 January 2009

"Let's see...it was on an island. And there was a snake. And the snake had legs and he could walk all around the island...yes, that's true...a snake with legs.

And the man and the woman were on the island too. And they were not very smart, but they were happy as clams. Yes...let's see...then one evening the snake was walking about the garden and he was talking to himself and he saw the woman and they started to talk. And they became friends. Very good friends.

And the woman liked the snake very much because when he talked, he made little noises with his tongue and his long tongue was licking about his lips. Like there was a little fire inside his mouth and the flame would come dancing out of his mouth. And the woman liked this very much.

And after that, she was bored with the man. Because no matter what happened...he was always as happy as a clam.

What did the snake say? Yes. What was he saying? What did he say? Ok. I will tell you...

The snake told her things about the world. He told her about the time when there was a big typhoon on the island and all the sharks came out of the water. Yes, they came out of the water and they walked right into your house with their big white teeth. And the women heard these things.

And the man came out and said, "we have to go now," and the woman did not want to go because she was a hothead. Anyway...they got into their boat and they left the island, but they never stayed anywhere very long because the woman was restless. She was a hothead.

And this is not a story my people tell. It's something I know myself. And when I do my job, I am thinking about these things. Because when I do my job, that is what I think about."

-Laurie Anderson
"Hothead"
United States Live Part IV