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.
