Maji Moto

7 September 2010

We are in an unstable atmosphere. The river is rising and its current is strong. Night storms bucket-dumped into the St. Croix Valley and lightening seared its sides. The thunder rumbled softly first but then pinned me, crouching and drenched, to step 73 up the bluff. Now the river is swollen, bloated, and hungry for more. The tide is stealth. It snatches stumps and lazy logs. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, their slick and knotty snouts keep the current's time. An empty bottle of bourbon shuttles downstream, the shell that gave shape to somebody's I am filled with regret or I wish you would call.

Tomorrow, when startled herons swoop their goodbyes, beavers will waddle down shoreless, shortened banks like pudgy ladies catching a bus. The fish will jump. Good little streams will come tumbling down and then somersault into the soft palms of the St. Croix hand.

And then when it is dark again, but still, I will paddle upstream while the glass-topped river slides past me like hooded monks in silent prayer. They will quietly carry cupfuls of moon.

I dreamed that I went somewhere else. That flailing limbs gave way first to melting pelts, then to writhing maggots, and finally to heaps of bones. They lay scattered, gleaming, and pretty. Sisters groomed, first one and then the other. And so we build. On hidden histories and piles of bones.

Maji moto, just this side of Kitirua's gate to Amboseli, swells, too, when the rains do come. It is a depression that fills and beckons to buffalo and bathing boys. Lions lounge. Interrupted herds of zebra up-fling their heads and hightail it, chucking their leftover water back into the pool.

Maji moto, and we are in hot water indeed. Glaciers are melting, the wells are running dry, and still there is the private weight and weather of our own days. Where is the aquifer that hydrates your solar plexus? I will pluck out the straws and cork the leaks. Let me lash hinged thimbles to your fingertips. The ten tiny buckets will swing like iron wind chimes when you walk, heavy with the catch of your rain.

I used to have a pony with one brown eye and one blue. Equestrian purists would say she was barn sour, but I think she just had a well-developed sense of belonging. She was fat and the saddle hardly knew her back from her belly. In the late afternoon I would ride her to a borrow pit that had filled with groundwater and she would wade in, to the tops of my ankles and the bottom of that barrel belly. And then when the shadows grew long over Oregon's green-gone-golden grass, I knew it was time to turn the boat around, drop the reins, and let the pony go home.

Birding with Nkii

30 April, 2010

Off of Pea Island, gannets plummet like cluster bombs from an Atlantic coast overhead thoroughfare, spearing beak-first bodies into the sea like swords into flesh.

In Amboseli, Yellow-Billed Storks slice rain-sweetened swamp water with bizarre and banded beaks ajar like giant clothespins. Their heads crane one way while twiggy pink legs slink another. Their long toes grow right up out of the water and sink back in while they perform a spooky choreography in slow lock step.

These creatures scale the castle and hold me captive. I am mesmerized.

But while kites, doves, and waxwings could each title a chapter of my life, I am not a birder. I do not pepper my paths with a Hansel and Gretel trail of bird lists. Binoculars will not, in the end, leave subtle signature of their weight on my cervical spine. I am unlikely, while discussing the electoral college or the lyrics of Bob Dylan, to cock my head, lift one finger, raise twinkling eyes and bush eyebrows and interject, "Prothonitory Warbler."

One does not so much learn to bird as is called to, like a priest or a prophet.

Mt. Kilimanjaro stands quietly over us all, a white-haired wise man. It was with authentic disbelief last year that my stepfather looked up and out at that benevolent behemoth and asked my mother and me how it was possible that we did not feel the giant magnet pulling us up the side of the mountain.

I imagine this must be what it is like for birders. The skies and seas and trees are full of magnets. Fluttering, flying, soaring, and diving shards that exact obedience from the steel of the birder's retina, emitting a frequency to which only their ears are tuned. Climbers must climb and birders must bird.

Ndugu yangu answers to many names. Lenkai ole-rikoyen. Nangama. Mostly he is called Nkii. He cooks with a gentle hand just right for banding birds and cleans with a temperament that was made for minding the mist nets. He is his mother's spitting image and he has the patience of Job. In another life he could have been an ornithologist. He would perhaps have been the kind of scientist who is eventually crowded out of his own office by stacks of papers that he does indeed mean to file, but for the more pressing task of watching the birds. Publishing at a lower than average rate, he would have, by honest accident, as a simple consequence, compiled the world's most detailed and thorough set to date of Notes on Birds. In another life, he would have been the boy in the back of the class who appeared to be daydreaming, but was not.

In this life, the classroom was not in his cards. In this life, he is a cook and a friend. He is a family man and a cattle man. And in this life he is a birder. He can recite the history of the this camp in a succession of nests. A petite mud cup is tucked safely up under a tent shelter, built by the Spotted Morning Thrush that he can call in like a pet, perfectly parroting at least two of its multiple songs. Look, do you see? Masterful Red-rumped Swallows have glued their gourd-shaped upside-down sand castle, bit by muddy bit, so that it hangs heavy like a bubbling udder from the tin ceiling of the choo. And up there, that hole in the tortilis tree where the Lilac-breasted Rollers have just fledged their young? It was built by and home to hornbills before it was at stake in a legendary battle between The Barbets and The Rollers.

Like the Brittish birding tradition, Nkii's own tradition grew out of the hunt. Approaching adolescence, Maasai boys step into the first rite of passage in a series of rites that mark the stages in a Maasai life. Slender boy bodies wrapped in shiny black shukas signal the emergence of a new circumcision cohort. After circumcision, having transitioned together as peers, these just-turning-warriors-but-still-only-boys tromp through the bush in packs throwing stones at birds. They stuff and string their trophies to build the most impressive headdress, the most beautiful lopir. These lithe and wily hunter prepare their fallen angels like the specimens that I used to visit at Chicago's Field Museum. Those birds napped like neatly folded and color-coded socks tucked into dresser drawers. Stacks upon stacks of sliding trays grew into towering cabinets that loomed over a seven-year-old like skyscrapers. The whole world in birds, waiting just for me.

"Pick a bird, any bird!"

"Meadowlark...kingfisher...flamingo!"

Scientists plump their specimen skins with cotton, but in Maasailand the stern little crafts boys relieve their birds of the innards to fill them out again with small grass bundles. The just-turned-warrior-but-still-only-a-boy threads stiff grass through feathered nostrils and ties it to string. Hanging each specimen from the ring round his head, the growing collection drapes around his neck and down his back.

Circumcision is not a private affair. If a boy-turning-warrior winces in fear or grimaces in pain while under the knife, his peers will taunt him by plucking red feathers from his lopir. The throat of a Rosy-patched Bush Shrike will be bare if it hangs from the head of a coward. After months of wearing, the mother of the boy will discard the specimens in a ritual of thanks, a gesture of gratitude to the birds for their involuntary service.

This was the channel through which Nkii was summoned. Now, outside the camp kitchen he has buried to plastic jerry cans that he fills daily with fresh water. That the visitors all have species names in Kimaasai speaks to the Maasai naturalist tradition. That Nkii knows them all speaks to his calling. Mousebirds, tinkerbirds, firefinches, barbets. Purple Grenadiers and cordon-bleus. Starlings, Wattled and Superb. And weavers. White-headed Buffalo and White-browed Social. Spectacled, Chesnut, and Black-headed. What is the name? Ask him and he will tell you. They all gather to drink from Nkii's oasis, sipping and tipping tiny heads back, while he sorts this night's rice, removing the stones, one grain at a careful time.

Tough Lady

7 February, 2010

I stopped at thirty when I counted the elephants behind my tent last night. They rumbled and trumpeted and stomped around until I thought Kili's new snows might shake down right off the mountain. I thought I might march out there with my hands on my hips, "Some of us are trying to get some work done, you know!" But just then fourteen heavy-legged white storks came in for a landing. They turned that dead snag into twilit praise-Jesus church risers with their bill-clattering rounds, and tethered me to one holy moment. They hyenas uptrill, the dik-diks tiptoe, and the mongoose prowl, so I must be back in the shallow bowl of Amboseli.

Zebras wade through fields of hock high grass. Baboon kids cartwheel, backflip, and peer over the backs of their big, fat mamas. Camp is so overgrown that I cannot see the kitchen and each night mosquitos swarm into a high pitched superhighway traffic jam at my tent screen. Southern black flycatchers swoop and dive like rangy skateboarders on a half-pipe, click-click-clicking their way through buggy meals. Whole fields of grasshoppers fiddle a halleleujah call and an amen response.

"Hello, excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"

This used to be a thorny and punishing place. It was a harsh and hardened lava rock landscape. It was sun scorched salt pans without any shade. Better pack your hardened hooves and a thick hide if you come at all, I would have said. But rain finally came! Rain came and softened those mean horizons and menacing thorns with new growth. Then it doused us all with a twinkling white powder of bustling butterfly wings.

But last year was still that year. It was still the year the long rains failed and all the cattle died. Ndugu zangu laugh when they tell me they each have one single cow. Waving their hands around they say, "all this grass and nothing to eat it!" Like the Maasai cattle, the wildebeast population crashed last year like a Cessna into a mountainside, and the predators that were living large while the plane went down now have nothing to eat. Hungry lions are lurking, their sights set on the few cattle that survived.

A deep imprint of the drought remains and what am I doing back here again? My job description is simple enough. Look and watch. But last year that meant watching a rising tide of protracted suffering. Death bubbled up from the core of the earth and spread out across the plains. It crept up the legs of anything standing. It was hot, it was silent, and it was horrible. This new Amboseli is still one tough lady. But those surprises that are sure to cross your vision if you stand somewhere, anywhere, and watch something, anything, for eight hours a day? Now those are just as likely to be playful and kind as they are cruel.