Driving.

“Oh Dear God, We are Going to DIE.”

I remember that phrase on constant repeat in my head during my unprepared and ill-advised ascent of the Polish Tatras. I had decided to climb a mountain in late May with little more than a t-shirt and ultralight rain jacket – the kind that costs an arm and a leg because it weighs no more than a paper clip and fits in a tea-cup - a coarse park map and no compass. Just as I was convinced of my imminent demise then, I am now. “Oh God, we are going to die.” I mutter it under my breath to myself as the ancient Landrover steering wheel ricochets between my hands. We are on the long road from Arusha to Serengeti, and I am convinced that at any moment the wind will blow us straight off of the fresh tarmac. Even on the best road in the district, the landy pulls and sways, as though yearning for the ditch along the road, and I constantly remind myself to breathe as I focus hard on staying straight. Daladalas stuffed with passengers pass by effortlessly but I am scared to turn my head lest I lose my tenuous grip on our straight path forward.

It is June 22, 2010. Today I am 27 years old, crossing that bridge from “mid-20’s” to “late-20’s,” and while I joke about how my bones creak and short-term memory is fading, I am still too young to die. Meshack laughs quietly beside me – he is our prized fundi, our expert mechanic, and is making the long trek to Serengeti for no other reason than to make sure that I (and the car) make it there in one piece. “Tuende!” he says, motioning forward. Let’s go. I gulp loudly and clench the wheel tighter. There really is no respite from the terror – on the open tarmac I have to go faster; as we slow for villages there are pedestrians and bicyclists, peddlers and Maasai and livestock that weave alongside the road erratically, and I am convinced that at any moment one of them will meander into the path of my Monster Truck. Winding up the gnarled and pockmarked Crater road are blind turns and oncoming trucks that only further the terror of the already perilous ascent. I am torn between the urgent need to reach the park gates before they close, and my desire to remain alive and in more or less one piece. When we stop at the Crater rim (in part for Patriki to take a picture, in part for me to try and restart my heart), Meshack glances at his watch nervously. Ever so gently, he offers, “Maybe it would be faster if I drive?”

I almost kissed him. The passenger seat in a Landrover has never felt quite so luxurious – before or since – though I still question my lifespan on a daily basis from the driver seat. For example, George, my coworker on the Lion Project, has been teaching me to drive offroad. “It is just fine,” he assures me as we begin to climb the veritable of dusty soil and clumpy vegetation. Except when it is not fine. As we circle and spin and weave through aardvark hole-ridden hilltops, I can see him clutch the window frame suddenly in panic, his foot involuntarily slamming down where the break pedal should be. The landrover falls into the abyss where ground once was. Ka-thunk. I hold my breath and resist the visceral urge to slam on the accelerator and clear away from the danger as fast as I can. The landy keeps chugging forward, powered by the magic that is low-range. The rear tire plummets to the depths of hell and haltingly crawls back out. We are alive. Barely. George laughs. “Avoid that green grass!” he reminds me. I am lost – it’s all green. “That’s green!” I point, “and that! And that over there!” It is all green and it all looks the same, but George sees some magical difference. I’m told that in time I will see it too. In the meanwhile, however, I maintain my running commentary. “OH dear GOD, we are going to die!...oh, okay, we’re okay. OH GOD that’s a hole! Oh, okay, we are alive. That’s just grass.” Except when it’s not.

Sunset.

The Pink House

The Pink House is the Savannas Forever fortress near Arusha's gated neighborhood. It sees a constant flow of SF employees and affiliates, lion researchers or grad students stopping on their way in or out of Serengeti. It is like a pink stucco fortress next to a village that has burros tied to their bus stop. ( seriously. We think it is a backup plan in case the daladala doesn't come.)
After inner-city Arusha excursions and watching world cup soccer eating homemade chips mayai, we head to Serengeti for months of dirt and dust and the most breathtaking wildlife in the world.

But we will miss our Pink House Friends.

June 18 2010

Even as I walk, it is a struggle to keep my eyes open. I am going on 40 hours without sleep, the world taking on that hazy, throbbing, sleep-deprived glare, the lights are harsh and do not want to focus. I had such grand plans for my 3.5 hours in Amsterdam, but all I want to do is curl up into a ball and sleep.

As soon as I step into the bathroom, a familiar wave of “underwhelm” floods over me. The stalls are floor-to-ceiling plastic laminate, off-white with speckled blue. The toilets feel plastic and cheap; there are no vertical tanks and the water flows weakly into the bowl upon flushing – seemingly impotent in comparison to our noisy, torrential, tornado-like toilets. There is only a short, narrow mirror offset from the two plain ceramic sinks. Even the shadiest Taco Bells in the US have snazzier toilets than the Amsterdam airport, and I begin to wonder if Americans just love their bathrooms. Our bathrooms have colorful tile and big, well-lit mirrors; shiny metal stalls that create an air of spaciousness with their open tops and bottoms. Did you know that you can buy dual aquarium/toilet-tanks? The CBS featured “Fish’n’Flush” is just one of a whole line of home improvement products that lets you blend your bathroom time with some quality pet-bonding. You can watch little Nemo swim around while you heed nature’s call. The “Fish’n’Flush” page boasts that this is what you need if you are a homeowner that wants to make a statement. On the same page is an ad for helping the world’s poorest of poor. We like our bathrooms, apparently.

Amsterdam is simply not as shiny as I feel it should be. It is like my dingy, graying MacBook – dulled in the splendor of the shiny new metallic models – exuding an aura of aging technology. The strange dissonant drabness lingers as I walk around. I stare in bleary-eyed amusement at a woman in fitted pants and high heels, and a gentleman in a gray blazer – his hair spiked into a faux-hawk, the product crispy and shiny – they walk with authoritative strides, collecting stray trash with their bare hands. I’ve never seen such a well-dressed custodial couple. Everywhere there is cleaning. Motorizing and cleaning. They love their motorized carts here – there are carts of every kind – passenger carts with back-to back benches, driven by well-postured flight attendants in crisp blue skirt-suits with bright white trim - that swerve frenetically around rolling luggage and dawdling travelers. Police on gimmicky segways that whirr weakly through the crowds. There are standing carts and sitting carts; blue carts and green carts; carts with metal boxes on the backs; carts dragging wheelchairs; carts - little orange carts – with brushy floor cleaners that spray and scrub the dull tan-gray tiles. Everywhere there is endless cleaning and motorizing.

With my overweight bags stacked on a little pushcart, I meander through the branching hallways. The light drizzles down through a slatted ceiling that looks like someone’s unwanted venetian blinds. Venetian blinds – how I hated them as a child. They were on all of our windows and there was nothing I wanted more than fluffy, billowing curtains or a satin window shag - something to soften the harsh angularity of the vinyl strips and the sharp corners of the window frames. Here in the airport halls, these ceiling slats dull the florescent light, and it fall flat on the drab décor. The floor is a 70’s era gray-brown, the walls alternately paneled peach wallpaper, frosted windows, or tiny coral-colored tiles.

It is almost 11 months to the day that I was here before, lost and scared, an untried mzungu embarking on my first real academic expedition. I am back now, admiring the cheese and chocolate, the well-dressed herds of flight attendants, shopping clerks, and snappy passerby(s?). I am excited and ready for anything, although desperate for orange juice and a nap. I curl up on the sofa near the unending “waterspa” that whirs and buzzes and opens and closes – a massage bed topped with some sort of super snazzy water-massage device that the lonelyattendant runs again and again and again. People walk without pausing, turning their heads as they pass to stare curiously, but they do not stop. So the spa goes on whirring and buzzing and opening and closing, and all around the little motorized carts – blue and green and orange, stand-up or sit-down style – go puttering by. In the gray, muted lights I curl up on top of my luggage, piled beside me on the bench, and close my eyes to this electric lullaby.

Take 2: Return to Serengeti

17 June 2010

To be honest, I don’t actually know what the date is. We are between time: moving forward, skipping beats. Leaping ahead 14 hours when we really should only saunter 6. We are somewhere between today and tomorrow, and I’m not sure I’m ready for it to come.

Almost 11 months to the day, I am once again heading into the future. I remember how new and fresh these moments were 11 months ago. I was an untried mzungu waltzing into the bush, some white chick from the American Dream suburbs, raised on lattes and cul-de-sac kickball, and almost reluctant to admit that I thought I might be able to say something insightful about lion-hyena-leopard interactions. But this time I am confident and cool…I am proud of what I have done so far and excited for what is to come. I have a study design that blends novel concepts with a cutting edge empirical pursuit. I have camped out surrounded by hyenas, I have tracked lions and been charged by elephants. I have my name in Smithsonian. I have more than a snazzy-sounding elevator-clip of my research to back up my plans. And, perhaps most importantly, I have money. Not only did I score a sweet fellowship, but I raised $24,000 in grants for the season - for even in academia, money makes the world go round. For the first time since graduate school began, I feel like I just might be able to pull this thing off.

Chasing day across the Atlantic, I am stunned by how different this flight is from my last. It feels small and cramped, and though the plane sits 8 across, we are all entranced in our own worlds – instead of appearing in the aisles, where we all feel guilty for blatantly ignoring the jaded attendants, the safety talk is given on our personal seatback tv’s, by a redhead with a little button nose and unusually prominent cheekbones. I remember her from my last international flight, with her weird wagging finger when she reminds us severely not to smoke.

My traveling companion has not said a word to me, though he gets “special meals” which means that they come 40 minutes before mine and waft alluringly while I wait, half-hungry and half-asleep, for my box meal and cup of wine. I waver in and out of sleep, still in stunned disbelief that I am really going back.

In just a few days, I will be driving out to the Serengeti, armed with nearly 200 digital camera traps (DIGITAL!!!) and 5 months of bug spray. This time, when people inquire what I am doing for my project, I will tell them rather than ask. I am still studying the mechanisms driving carnivore coexistence, but now I know how I am doing it and what the ultimate picture will be. I am using camera traps to collect empirical data on spatial and temporal patterns of carnivore habitat use with respect to their competitors – and I will assess spatiotemporal partitioning as a mechanism of coexistence. But it doesn’t stop there. There are a million mechanisms postulated for species coexistence, but few, if any, have been tested in systems like mine. So I will test for interference-exploitation trade-offs, I will look for costs incurred by one competitor on another, I will find the R* of a lion…All of this I will do by analyzing images from these cameras for the next 2 years. But right now I will sleep. Tomorrow is coming, but it is not here yet, and I will revel in today while it lasts…even if all it means is my little seatback TV and boxed meal on a plane.

The End.

Sitting at the little airport in Arusha, I feel slightly shaky and close to tears. It could be that it’s nearly 2pm and I haven’t eaten anything yet today…but more likely I’m just sad to leave. I hear the whir of propellers and the grumbling of an engine and look up to see the zebra stripes lift off the runway – Felix in his happy little 4-seater Cessna rumbles off and out of sight. With his sly but easy smile, Felix is a dapper pilot. On the flight in (I being the only person in the world who travels from Seronera to Arusha via NAIROBE and KILIMANJARO) he is confident and deft, but not serious. We pull a couple of wicked turns and tilts, and then this charming Swiss pulls out all the stops. Felix drops the plane faster than gravity’s grasp on our bodies and we do a brief few seconds in zero-G. Things go soaring through the cockpit – the ashtray (it’s an old plane) levitates past my head, my luggage relocates from the floor to the back seat, and the dirt flies up and into our hair and onto our laps. Felix looks a bit sheepish – “Guess I should vacuum, eh?” I am giggling like a little girl. We dust off and take stock of the damage and we do it again.

But now, sitting and trembling with my milky cup of tea at the little Coastal Air terminal, I am in vague disbelief that this summer is over. Later today, the exhaustion will set in as I haggle with the taxi from the airport. Sitting in rush hour traffic, a crazy man will try to climb into the cab with me. “Look!” he will say, frantically pointing to his hand, even though there is nothing there. HE will mime handcuffs and mumble, and my driver Jumal will step out and pull him away. I will get to the hostel hungry and weary and I will listen to some disgusting missionary shout over the phone to his brainwashed son, lecturing him about some dumb girl he is dating back home at his private Christian college in bungwater, VA. The man talks loud enough for the whole hostel to hear and prays loudly on his phone for his son to see the light. When I wind up across from this man at dinner, it is a good thing that I do not have the energy to tell him about the taste he leaves in my mouth, because I would not have the energy to stop myself.

But all of this will happen later. For now, I sit in retrospective and brooding silence. I am strangely sad to leave a place that I barely got to know, struck with a bizarre sense of loss to leave a place that I will return to in less than a year. I cannot explain these feelings so I do not try. For now I just sit in retrospective and brooding silence, wishing Serengeti a sad and silent goodbye.

27-aug-09

Sitting at the hyena den, waiting for the tourists to leave, Candida is bleeding from the nose. We are in a land where people die from Malaria and sleeping sickness, tuburculosis and AIDS; I am slightly concerned. Candi has been recovering from her bout of malaria with surprising speed, but the blood worries me. She shrugs it off: “It is normal,” she says, “I feel fine.”

The tourists leave a cloud of dust as they follow the road across the dry, short grass clearing. The spectacularly alien Serengeti savanna exudes an aura of prehistory that reminds me vaguely of Yellowstone National Park. I remember the hot, acidic pools of our first National Park’s famous geyser basin. While most of the cookie-cutter tourists never waddled farther than the 300 ft from their car to Old Faithful, just past the famous geyser lay a minefield of colorful hot springs, each lined with rainbow rings of heat-adapted micro-organisms. In the weeks that I spent trying to “find myself” in Yellowstone, I most often lost myself watching the sun rise over the geyser basin. Sitting and watching the steam rise over the pre-dawn frost that sparkled in the low light of the waking sun felt like watching the dawn of time. I can remember thinking that maybe if I sat and watched those pools for a few billion years, I would see fish grow legs and crawl onto land.

The Serengeti too feels like a land before time, with the fat cape buffalo trundling through the tall grass in front of our yard, the elles eating our aloe garden, and the giraffe in their slow-motion methodically chewing through our acacia trees. I half expect sometimes to look up and see a brontosaurus browsing by our vaguely otherworldly creatures.

The Smithsonian reporter that was here asked us what the coolest was thing was that we’d seen in Serengeti. I remember falling silent. In four short weeks, I’ve seen a million breathtaking, heart-stopping events that I might never see again. I’ve seen a solitary female lion kill a Thompson gazelle in the middle of the day. I have spent the night next to 7 lions that draped themselves luxuriously over an elephant carcass while glowing hyena eyes circled impatiently around, sniffing and rejecting our onion skins and carrot shavings while waiting hungrily for the lions to leave. I have held my breath in the heat of a lion-elle standoff, and retreated from the middle of an epic 3 on 1 battle between neighboring male lions. I have helped to collar a female lion, to de-snare a tangled zebra, and to dart a mother elephant. Climbing a kopje one day, I came face to face with two unattended lion cubs. Camping out in the Western Corridor, I was awakened by a hyena sniffing the ground by my head with only the sheer synthetic fabric between us.

But despite all of the excitement that we stumble onto while making our daily rounds, I think my favorite thing of all is to sit on the veranda just before dawn and watch the world wake up. The house faces directly east and the sun always rises red through the haze of grass-fire smoke. From here I can sometimes see pink and purple lizards doing pushups on sunny rocks, showing off for their plain brown females, and knee-high Tommies locking horns and butting heads in a twitchy capoiera display.

The lions have moved back into the area and this morning I can hear them roaring from just past the neighbor’s house. A cautious hyrax approaches the bucket of leftover wash-water to steal a free drink, and plops down, splay-legged on the cold stone porch. One lazy morning, we spent an HOUR watching the elles pick off thorny branches from our toppled fever tree, their trunks snaking through the foliage, slow and methodical, moving it to their mouths. The elles are my favorite, with their thick, drooping skin that looks several sizes too big. The babies are only hip-high, and they wave their ears when they run to catch up to their moms. Some days the baboons move in slow, cacophonous procession around the house. They get into our rubbish pit and open our water tanks and sit and blink their ugly little eyes at me as they crunch on the fallen Acacia seed pods. Today, however, has been quiet, save for the lions sounding off in the gray morning light as Candi and I loaded the car for my last day in the field.

Finally, as the tourists move off, Candi sniffles and shoves the car into gear. We close in for some close-ups of the gnarled hyenas. So far, I have 271 photos from 4 dens, 2 kills, and a million random locations that I am trying to ID using ear notches and spot patterns. I anticipate spending most of my 11-hour layover in Jo-burg scowling at iphoto and grumbling to myself. As September draws near, I try to fend off the overwhelming sense of panic that rides along each day like oxpeckers on a cape buffalo’s back. I will just take it day by day, den by den, and spot by annoying-yet-individually-identifiable spot.