The Maasai of East Africa, the Rohingya of Myanmar and even the 4th generation Rhodesian farmers of Zimbabwe are inhumanely imprisoned in modern societies incapable of figuring out how to assimilate them.
No better example of this conundrum than America’s own native Americans. We visited the site of Little Bighorn. It’s one of the most moving national monuments in our country.
I spotted the first group of bison for a half-second before we continued sailing along the paved road and a ridge obscured the valley in which I glimpsed them. No problem. A gravel track headed out that way.
The “Wildlife Loop” road that runs around the periphery of the park is a nicely paved circuit. There are so many bison in the park you’ll certainly see many of the big, old bulls sitting near the paved road chewing their cud.
But to see the larger herds and the calves, you’ve got to leave the paved road and head to a southern plains area appropriately called “Buffalo Corrals.”
Sunday in Wall, South Dakota, is not unlike any other day at first glance. The town is jam-packed with tourists. This is because the town is the Wall Drug Store, founded in 1933, an enterprising theme park that collects tourists off I-90 like black flies off the Black Hills, motorists at their wits ends after 12 hours of driving through flat cornfields.
Main Street is Wall Drugs on one side and Wall Drug spinoffs on the other side. Wall Drugs is a half-mile of winding creaking corridors of fudge shops, gun dealers, American flags, skin sellers, tonic brewers, restaurants, western clothing dealers with every clerk dressed like Annie Oakley or Roy Rodgers. Roy Orbison booms behind the many old photos plastered everywhere and if you accidentally bump into an employee in the halls, she courtsies or he bows.
I’ve always felt there’s a lot of similarity between America’s Wild West and parts of wild Africa, and that may help to explain why proportionately fewer Americans who live in places like Montana and South Dakota visit Africa than from urban areas.
Well I hope to revisit this question in the next couple weeks. Kathleen and I are on our way to Yellowstone! On our way we’ll be traveling through the Badlands, Black Hills and native American lands of southern Montana looking for outstanding scenery, wildlife and America’s checkered internal history.
Stay tuned!
It’s hard to come home after being in Africa for two months in ways it never was before. All my life I’ve gone and come, often for long periods of time. Coming home was always the screenplay of happiness, refreshing yourself in everything familiar and wonderful.
Now when I return the airports, the grocery stores, the gas stations, the monthly board meetings for organizations, the weekend events – they are all frighteningly different. The people who make them have grown inwards and weary. Resignation is everywhere.
We ended our Namibian trip with two game drives in Etosha National Park. You’ll find it odd that we were not particularly excited that we saw three black rhino, two cheetah, four lion and several families of elephant. My personal exception: real excitement at finding a rare pair of blue cranes.
Why no jubilation? If we see one rhino at 700 yards in the crater we celebrate for days! One of the three rhino we saw in Etosha practically bumped the car. So what’s going on?
When Africa recovered from the millennia of drought that caused a small band of homo sapiens to migrate to Europe, the southern half of the continent flourished, again. Great grasslands and increasing forests nurtured enormous numbers of animals.
Then around 2000 years ago the climate in the south changed again, growing much hotter and drier. Many animals went extinct and those that remained were thinned out considerably.
For the endless generations that preceded Jao, the fertile valleys and hills of Damaraland filled his people’s pots with nutritious meats: too much oryx, springbok, kudu and sometimes even elephant. Damaraland was a paradise for hunter-gatherers. The climate was warm but not hot, the rains were good, and the great grasslands supported an enormous amount of wild game.
Only giraffe hadn’t experienced the quick death that Jao’s spear inflicted, its tip laced with the white toxin of the White Bush euphorbia. Giraffe were not hunted. It was known that with their necks outstretched, they could touch the clouds. Killing them might jeopardize the rains.
Each evening of unbelievable color was followed by a vast darkness illuminated by an universe crowded with stars and planets and meteors and ashy galaxies. But its absolute quiet was disingenuous, like a thick blanket tucked over you in the dead of winter that doesn’t keep out the cold.
We might not have heard the nuclear blasts, but they were all around us. We saw out of our world every time we looked up into the night sky.
Most of the time I fly on safari from place to place. Today we flew backwards, nearly 138 million years.
The Namib-Naukluft is the oldest desert in the world and it has changed little over that enormous span of time. Modern man’s interest, though, has resuscitated long dormant forms of life that quite naturally had ceased to exist here when the rain stopped falling. Now, some are back. And, the rain’s started falling, again. It’s all kind of creepy.
South Africa is a hiker’s paradise. Today I hiked the Highmoor Drakensberg Park for almost the entire morning, from sunrise to just before noon. I was the only hiker here at the top of the little Berg.
One of the great treats of mountain hiking is so many wild flowers, even now in the late fall. Most are quite small, but they are of every color imaginable. I even found a spiny leaf whose underside was blue!
The river just below my front patio roars with unusually strong, late summer rains. Tons of fresh sparkling water crashes onto the ancient dolomite boulders that haven’t moved since the beginning of time. The gushing is so loud I can’t hear her when she arrives.
She walks 15k from her small village of high mountain people who were displaced centuries ago from the verdant grasslands of the coast by the great Zulu warrior, Shaka. Her large, weathered face carriers that history, and ages of injustice that followed.
No one likes a braggart, a swashbuckler, a hotshot. But would you prefer instead a bootlicker, someone whose meekness is frighteningly unreal?
I’m sitting at my dining table typing this in a remote stone cottage just under the Little Berg of South Africa’s Drakensberg Mountains. Except for the wild brown trout stream gushing over large rocks just below my patio the night was still and cold. I slept long and hard and was awaken by mountain bird chirping hidden in the heavy mists draped off the Berg. This is the perfect place to reflect on such questions.
For the contrasts between South Africa and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa are harsh and bewildering.
I suppose every “big” event, whether NASCAR or a high school spelling bee, has a baseline everyone knows: Winners and losers are known and handicapped, so the drama often comes in the unexpected. That for sure has been the Great Migration ever since global warming.
But not this year!
No zebra. No wildebeest. A handful of gazelle. Just a handful of giraffe. Everyone was ecstatic, because there were 25 lion and a leopard, but I was worried.