fragments

My family cannot help comparing South Africa to other places, to the familiar - "These hills look like Ireland, don't they?" "This could almost be Newfoundland!" The damp green, the gentle slope. Why? To own it? I feel compelled to imprint something recognizable onto this landscape. We try to drain the exotic out of it. It makes it easier to look at.

***

All the safari guides with their wide stances, with their moustaches. There's monochrome to all of it. Khakis. They hold their hands behind their backs in locked grips, two fists. Everyone is so solid. Someone once told me, or I read it, or something, about all the women who come to Africa and fall in love with their guides. I can see how this could happen. You bypass or hop-skip that initial period of getting to know a person before trusting them. You have to jump in. They have the big gun. They know the rules. It's an enforced intimacy that is somehow redolent of survival, of getting-by.

***

Animals, in order of awe-factor: #1 Elephants. There is no comparison. #2 Giraffes. The same. We come closer to the prehistoric. Let's put rhinos up there too. There is no reason an animal should look like this. They didn't get the memo. Evolution skipped a beat. Everyone wants to see the lions, but they are really just big, sleepy house cats.

***

There's an emotional there-ness to Africa that I find exhausting. I think about the people I love who love this place. They are not people who live at the surface of things. I could see how these countries, this hard work, could give them a place to put their emotions, when they are not so comfortable carrying them. It eggs them on. I do better where I am the most dramatic thing on the landscape, where I have more room to enact my own daily hysteria. Maybe I am too selfish. The emotional there-ness of a place. Is that a thing?

***

In the jeep I press my feet against the metal like I have brakes beneath me. He pulls us closer to the animals and I stop breathing. No one else is as concerned as I am. My dad tells me that they know what they're doing, can sense when the animals will charge, are incited. Fine. But I know what I'm doing, too - I know that everything is unpredictable. You can't ever predict what anything or anyone will do in any particular moment. This is a truth that no one likes to be reminded of. You can't ever trust anyone. You can't ever trust a 600 pound leopard.