Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World (26 page)

The lioness’s tail flicks. The male puts his head down. In the distance, I hear the honking of a wildebeest herd that talked to me in the night. But the lions don’t budge. Their bellies are still swollen from their last meal.

David maneuvers the vehicle around them and switches the engine off. The male opens his eyes. They lock with mine. I don’t move. He doesn’t move. David has a gun somewhere in the vehicle, but I don’t imagine he could get to it if something were to go wrong. We are coexisting, in a tentative agreement. The air is cool, dry, light. I keep my voice low; I do not move except to breathe.

Until now, the only lions I’ve ever seen in my life have been in zoos. John Berger proposes that there is a certain sort of distancing in this view. In zoos, people look at animals, but animals rarely look at people. He writes, “At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter . . . That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society . . . has been extinguished.”

But has it?

The first time I ever found myself in wilderness with a large mammal, I was in northern Maine, standing on the opposite side of a pond from a full-grown moose. I remember thinking then how amazing it was that this creature could exist. That there was enough wilderness left in the world so that—even in the seemingly done-over continental United States—an animal as big as that could conceivably roam its whole life without seeing a human. And maybe this is, in a way, what Berger was talking about: seeing
and
being seen.

It startles me to realize that I came because I wanted to see animals, but what has moved me is the realization that
I
am being seen. I can look all I want, but it wasn’t until these eyes-of-the-wild saw me that I felt truly absorbed into the landscape. This lion’s witnessing of me is sending an electric current through my spine. It’s not a bolt of adrenaline, it’s the realization that—right now, in this very moment—I am as much a part of this place as he.

“It’s rare to have two males this close,” David says. “Maybe they are brothers.” The field lion is ambling toward us now, mouth open, jowls jiggling like those of a slobbering St. Bernard. “I think he’s headed toward that tree,” David says, pointing. He’s right. The lion ultimately dissolves into a dark puddle of shade.

I whisper in amazement, “How did you know?”

He says, “You must know the habitat and behavior of animals to understand them. It makes you a very good observer. I can say, most of the animals, you can read their body language. You can see them express, communicate without words.”

The entire landscape, in fact, seems to speak here. Each species, animal and plant, sings out its yearnings and desires, attracting and seeking the other living beings that will help it grow. Each and every living thing communicating, at once, with all the world. David says, “After being out here, when I go back to the city, I start to read people’s expressions more. Humans communicate in a lot of the same ways as these animals. They talk with their faces.”

The lion opens his eyes again. We’re staring directly at each other. Right now, I have to focus on the moment—not my abstract understanding of what
could
happen—if I want to keep cool. “Whereas in animals fear is a response to signal,” Berger writes, “in man, it is endemic.”

I’m working on this.

The wind through the grass sounds like the shush of elephants walking. I do not break my gaze. It feels like we’re playing a game of sudden death. And—because of the flies swarming his amber eyes, flies I’m close enough to see—the lion is the first to blink.

In this moment, the entire world is green and gold and blue. The entire world is here, in this field, this moment. I start to think of the field as my field. This lion as my lion. Maybe the human impulse for ownership is really a show of our yearning for connectivity, a way to fill an emptiness left by the modern view that we do not all share equally in wilderness, in all the world. Maybe it is this sense of belonging, not ownership, that we incessantly hunger for, somehow—in the mechanized view of modernity—confusing the two. All I really know is this: In this moment, I feel less like a skittish house cat, more like a self-assured lion.

When we finally leave, David gets a little turned around. Briefly, we are lost. Though the park has changed over the years due to all sorts of factors, human included, being here can make one forget time. There are no manmade symbols. Only rocks and hills and trees, and the symbolic significance we give them. “See that mountain?” he finally asks, pointing to a hill with the hard slope of an elephant’s forehead. “That’s the one that tells me where camp is.”

This is the sort of landmark awareness I’ve been trying to teach Archer lately, awakening him to using plants, and landmarks, and symbols to make his way in the world. If I were not having phenomenal experience after phenomenal experience, I would not be parenting in this way. If I were not being led by wonder, it is not the source from which I would teach. I know this because I sometimes catch myself saying things that do not line up with the experience I’ve gained.

Less than a week ago, on a morning car ride, I asked Archer if he knew where we were going. “To school!” he said. Then he looked out the window and asked, “Where is school? I can’t see it.” I laughed a little, hiding my amusement in the crook of my shoulder, and told him that, later, we’d look at a map, saying, “It’s located to the west.” And then I realized how odd it was that I was explaining this abstractly. To my still-viscerally-connected child, the word “west” meant nothing.

“Look at the sun,” I finally said. “The sun rises in the east, behind our house. It sets in the west. When you see the sun go down in the afternoon, you will know where your school is.” Archer went quiet. He has seen the point on the horizon where the sun sets. This, he understood.

Later that day, I told him about how moss grows on the north side of trees. I took him onto a neighbor’s land and asked him to lead us home by listening to the sounds of roosters and river currents. If we lived in a city, the sounds might have been those of a neighborhood dog, the winged flap of pigeons in a park, the beep and clank of a garbage truck, the cellist that leaves her window open during practice. Though the exercise didn’t go very well in terms of leading us home, it seemed to awaken him to a certain, phenomenal, order of things. It taught him, and reminded me, that there are a million different ways to map the world that have nothing to do with global positioning units, or even pens.

During our time with the lions, the wildebeest herds have somehow disappeared. David says, “I’ve had guests ask: ‘How can more than a million wildebeest just vanish?’ But it is a possibility. They move into areas that are not accessed. They have that instinct. They know when it’s time to migrate. We just don’t know exactly
how
they know.”

David’s guiding powers are similarly mysterious. Within twenty minutes, we’re staring into another gyrating field of flesh. The females move slowly, fluidly, but several males run wild, raising and bowing their heads. David points them out and says, “So much wasted energy!” It is the action of rutting season, with males trying to maintain territories. Their hooves kick up dust, tinting the whole scene sepia.

Another safari vehicle passes. David and the driver have a quick conversation in Swahili. He turns to me: “That guide told me there’s a fresh wildebeest kill ahead. Let’s go.”

I can’t help but feel a little uneasy about the fact that we’re headed to see a corpse. It doesn’t help when we pull up behind a vehicle of heavy-metal tourists in a car with “Predator Safaris” plastered across the spare-tire cover. Are we here to ogle a dead body, to stare at death? Or are we here to stare at life, energy repositioning, the circle actually cycling?

“Smell the blood and guts?” David asks. I do. It’s a disturbingly strong scent, unfolding wax paper in a butcher shop. “The food is plentiful now because of the migration,” David says. “When there’s not so much there’s a scrambling. Everyone trying to get a piece of the kill.”

The smell of blood iron will not leave me. Even when I breathe through my mouth, the air tastes rusty. If this were television, I could turn the channel. But I am in the bush, and I cannot—will not—look away.

This lioness is lying with the carcass of her prey, its fingerprint-distinctive stripes visible beneath a raw pink blossom of peeled-away skin. The two bodies appear to be sleeping together under a sheet of churning flies, haloed by the thorns of acacia limbs, in a loving embrace. David takes a deep breath. “This is a fresh kill. She probably pulled it there, into the shade.” The flies keep eating away. Laying eggs. Coaxing life from death, light from darkness.

A hyena appears, as if pulled by its nose. It circles our vehicle, searching. It comes three feet from where I’m sitting by an open picture window. It smells the kill, but when it sees the lion, the hyena retreats into high grasses. “It will come back to eat what the lion has left,” David says. “Nature does not waste.”

He sometimes has guests who turn their heads from carcasses. Sometimes, visitors will not even look at a lion because of the role it plays. He reasons: “I think for most guests it’s just a gross factor or mortality fear. Some people are just not used to facing reality.”

It’s a perspective that David, who has spent the last few years of his life studying biology and living in the bush, does not understand. What we’ve witnessed is necessary. It is, in the end, what supports cycles of life that span generations and species. “If it were not for the lions, the predators, how many wildebeest would there be?” David asks. “What would that do to the habitat? It would vanish. And then,
all
the animals would vanish.”

We leave the crowds and drive, without seeing any other vehicles, for a long time. David goes quiet. I cannot see his eyes—he only removes his signature shades after sunset—but his brow is furrowed. Finally, he says, “The way that it all works together is an ecosystem. The things we cannot know outside of science, I call that God. But there are people that say of all the mysteries, we will find out in time.”

“But new mysteries are born every day,” I say.

David chuckles.

“Muslims, Christians, everyone has different names for God,” he says. “But outside the institutions, I think people are almost always talking about the same thing.”

“Yeah,” I say, “me, too.”

I’m coming to believe we’re collectively yearning for what Jung called the
Anima Mundi.
It’s a term borrowed from ancient alchemists who searched for the spiritual radiance of God, not as a somewhere-out-there abstraction, but rather in the physical, phenomenal world. They sought to turn commonplace metals into gold, holy light embodied.

According to my dear college friend Aaron—fluent in Greek and Latin—
Anima Mundi
basically translates as “Soul of the World.” Not long ago, still reeling from my bout of synchronicity in Sweden, I told Aaron—son of a Catholic mother and Jewish father, scholar of ancient Greek myth—that instead of choosing my religion, I feel like I’m creating my own, piecemeal, as I stumble through the wilds.

At this, he laughed. And he laughed. And then he said: “Aren’t we all?”

 • • • 

When David and I arrive at camp, Osman meets us with drinks and white towels that turn copper when we wipe our hands. The campsite, surrounded by thorn bushes, is alive with ratcheting, sawing sounds. “What’s making that noise?” I ask David, who has already downed most of his hand-squeezed lemonade. “It sounds like cicadas.”

“It is cicadas.”

I’d been expecting an exotic answer. This is, after all, a place where one should—upon hearing the beat of hooves—think zebras, not horses. But, despite the fact that cicadas have long been part of the summer soundtrack of my life, I’d never before considered them. Probably because I’ve never heard a cicada sing quite as loudly as this.

I turn my head so that my right ear is pointed toward a nearby bush. My eardrum begins to throb and pulsate inside of my head. The entire landscape seems to echo in my skull. The sound of the insects—which can reach 120 decibels, causing human hearing loss—is so loud it burns.

I go back to my tent, where fiber mats that smell of sea grass are rough underfoot. I wash my hands in rainwater from a brass container. When the tinkling against metal ceases, I hear comic snorting outside. I unzip my tent to see a line of wildebeest moving through. I’m part of something ancient and uninterrupted. But then again—even though I’ve long neglected to acknowledge it—I always have been.

I wander through camp, noticing cracked trees for the first time. When I find Ivan, a round-faced camp manager, lingering by the campfire, he tells me the downed trees are the result of elephant visits. The animals come through periodically, rubbing against the acacia. Ivan says, “When they move, nothing can really stop the elephant. It is a symbol of a king.”

Tembo
is the Swahili word for elephant. Ivan, father of three boys, tells me some parents name their children Tembo, which would indicate that their child was wise.
Punda
means Zebra. “If you were named Punda, you might be beautiful and sensitive, healthy,” Ivan explains. “You might be graceful, quite agile.” A daughter named Cicada might be a high-pitched crier, a natural-born singer.

“The Maasai, they have clan names—Hyena, Lion,” Ivan says. “Even other tribes, no matter where you go, name after animals. Tribes in the highlands name their children after things like rain. You can name with nature—how nature behaved when you were born or how your mother acted when she was pregnant.” If you were born during a full moon, for example, you might be called Shining Moonlight. “You grow into a name,” Ivan says. “A name is also a story. It tells people who you are. Sometimes the name doesn’t fit, but it is to keep a memory. It’s an identity. It’s who you are and where you’re from.”

“Ivan is an interesting name,” I say.