The animals!

The dawn I arrived in the port of Cape Town, I felt a strong sense of homecoming—a bit perplexing, since I have never been there! But the oldest human remains found to date came from South Africa, so perhaps some sense of ancestry floats in the dim recesses of consciousness… I know with certainty that I must return, as I have known since childhood I needed to get here.

Now the moment I have been waiting for… I did a three-hour elephant back safari at dawn in a game reserve. I got to ride the lead elephant, Jabulani (Rejoice!), who was rescued from a pit as an infant and carefully nurtured back to health over a year-long special care program. My guide was a man from Zimbabwe, Emmanuel. Emmanuel asked me if we had big parks like this in California and I told him about Yosemite and Sequoia and the animals there. He asked me what bears sound like and I replied that they roar. “Roar?” he asked. So I did a bear roar, creating much general arousal amongst guides and elephants alike. Later in the day I saw Jabulani and Emmanuel at shouting distance and asked Emmanuel how a bear sounds. “RRRRooooarrr!”

A walking ground crew with rifles led those of us on elephant back because it is a natural game park, including lions and leopards. Walking along for the ride were three baby elephants, one of them so young he could not yet coordinate his trunk, but rushed and/or mounted the other two enthusiastically at every opportunity. I have a great sequence of photos in which the moms are watching the play get increasingly rambunctious, then you see the trunks begin to reach out, the little one is swept up entirely by his mom, and the other two get gentle but definite trunks laid over them to pull them back and tuck them up to mother. At one point, I dropped my quart water bottle and Jabulani picked it up, he started to hand it back to me over the top of his head, then decided he was thirsty, put it in his mouth and crunched it, drinking the water. He gave me back the squished and empty bottle. These elephants were well trained but not perfectly obedient, not having had their spirits broken; they were happy, cooperative, and willful enough to maintain some dignity.

On that one ride I saw giraffes, zebras, Cape buffalo, warthogs, crocodiles, wildebeest, and monkeys. At the end of the ride, I bought the DVD that included African music I’d somehow missed on the safari. And, when I returned to the ship, I heard some strange ethereal music playing over the ship sound system. I thought it strange that they were playing Asian music between South Africa and Mauritius. Then I learned that I was listening to “The Elephant Orchestra.” Yes, real elephants making elephant music with giant xylophones, improvising. This treat was shared by our ethno-musicologist, Joe Moreno, who is making me a copy.

The life of animals that I saw, the number of species, the large size of the herds, the naturalness of the environment, the family groupings, the interspecies cooperation: all amazed me and delighted me. Giraffes and zebras and warthogs are typically seen together, all grazing in the same place. If only I can get some photos up, I can share some of this amazing world… a rhinoceros in the water with just a bit of head and back above water line, giving a lift to a turtle who rode on his back, and, of course, the equivalent of cow birds, happily grazing on the insects living on the happily grazing herds. I saw a family of elephants do a dust bath, close up enough to have a face full of dust. I saw a giraffe baby wobbling along with his daddy, looking around in complete wonderment, and often hiding within daddy’s long legs, his umbilical cord still hanging from his belly. I was so close to an alpha male lion that I could have reached out and touched him; instead I tucked up and took a photo as he walked past me! Of course, these lions hunt, and so do the leopards, but the overarching sense of the natural world is that it is the garden where the animals live in essential harmony, a garden we not only left but also have largely destroyed. It is sad and I felt a longing for that garden, but also the hope that we can continue to create places in which to learn our place anew.

And yesterday I read on the BBC that South Africa has approved an elephant cull, heartbreaking news to my eyes. The PETA folk say, “How much like humans do they have to be before you call it murder?” And it brings home to me that we are in dire need of an entirely new model of ethics, one that honors life while respecting the necessity of death—for all of us. In the real circle of life, yes, the impala dies, the lion dies, and the man dies, too, all having loved their lives dearly.