December 3, 2021

 

Hereford, Arizona, 0745

 

Home. Friday.

 

I arrived in Tucson around 1300 on Tuesday. Gina picked me up and drove the hour-and-a-half to Hereford. Early dinner, sleep 13 hours.

 

The trip was relatively uneventful. Everything went without a hitch. Public health officials met us at the gate in Atlanta and screened for PCR test results before we could deplane (after multiple screenings in JNB - everything happens multiple times). CDC does not require isolation but recommends 7 day isolation and testing at 3 - 5 days. I’ll isolate and I’ll test on Monday. Customs and Immigration in Atlanta were a breeze. It’s the most efficient process I’ve ever experienced coming back into the country. Kudos to whoever is responsible for that. I think a lot of bullshit has fallen by the wayside with the pandemic. I didn’t have to fill out a form pretending to claim all the refrigerator magnets and coasters and trinkets I brought back. They just verified my identity and welcomed me back.

 

It’s hard to describe the physical effect of jet lag and long travel. By my quick reckoning, from the time I left Orpen Camp until the time I hit home was 44.5 hours.  Forty-four hours upright, without any real sleep. My butt really hurts and I’m sure I have the beginnings of pressure sores…. Neck and shoulders hurt and even now, two days later, I feel foggy, as though I was very hung over.  Sleep is approaching a normal pattern, but I still wake up at about 0330.

 

In a way, it seems like there’s a bright line between being in the bush and the experience of being home, but when I think about it, not really. There is bush here. Even though it’s cold here, we always sleep with windows cracked so that we can hear and this morning at about 0315 I heard the chorus of coyotes. We hear coyotes (“our” coyotes) often here and I believe that this is a greeting ceremony, where they all raise their voices in excited yips and songs. Something about the timbre of their voices makes it sound like there are many, many coyotes when I suspect it’s a family group of maybe six or eight. The vocalizing raises to a crescendo and then dies in about 20 seconds and then it’s dead quiet again.

 

Then I heard what I thought was lions in the far distance and realized that it was our older cat, groaning in her sleep.

 

While there’s no first francolin here, there is the early morning call of a great horned owl and then later the birds do begin to fire up. We have our own dawn chorus.  So, yes, there is bush here too and I think part of the learning is that you don’t have to go halfway around the world to find the wild. But you must look harder and be attentive to the background.

 

I’m here now, looking out the window of our dining room at the Huachuca Mountains in the morning light. It never gets old.

 

Re-entry is strange and, together with the physical disorientation of jetlag, I feel flat and unmotivated. It’s hard to believe that I was in the bush just a few days ago and now I’m back, as though nothing happened. I do have the tan lines from the sandals on my feet though, and they remind me every day that the experience was real.

 

But for now, it’s figuring out my Medicare plan for 2022. I put hummingbird feeders back out yesterday, hoping they missed me. It’s washing clothes and grocery lists and worrying about budgets. And thinking about work and what’s next for Gina and me.

 

I’ll begin editing images too. I have a winter’s worth of tinkering with images. I went into this wanting to minimize my focus on photography. It’s probably a good thing because, while I’m sure I have some things to work with, this was a disappointing trip in terms of the quality of images I’ve shot. Some of that has to do with seeing so few large, high profile animals. After the 4 days at Umlani, I spent a full three weeks in the Park. During that time, I had 3 fleeting sightings of lions. No sightings of leopard. No rhino sightings. Very little in the way of crocs. Some buffalo. Good hyena sightings. Three brief wild dog sightings. Of course, the lack of large animal sightings led me to shift focus to shooting birds and to experience constant frustration because birds are jerks.

 

I’m not sure why sightings were so limited. Some of it is due to making the decision to go north in the Park where large animals are less densely concentrated. Maybe something changed in my work habits? I don’t know. I think going by myself may have something to do with it. When I traveled with Gina, her eyes were enormously important in spotting game. 

 

And I particularly worry about rhino. Obviously poaching is a concern in the Park. There’s a fair amount of denial about that and the party line is that poaching is decreasing but it’s hard to see how that could be true. The Park has struggled with funding everything else (like maintenance) during the pandemic and it’s hard to believe that anti-poaching efforts haven’t been affected.

 

But the photography is what it is. I got to be there and did my best to be present and to soak it in. I didn’t exactly see things through the eyes of a first-time visitor, but I never forgot for a moment how fortunate I was to be there and what a privilege it is to be able to experience this world that I’ve been obsessed with since I first knew there was such a thing as Africa. And if the plumbing was funky, I remembered what a miracle it is to be able to take a hot shower way out here in the bush. And if a termite landed in my glass of cheap South African red, I plucked it out and finished the glass, regretting the impact on the life of that little bit of wild. I tried to consciously express appreciation to everyone working out in the bush during this time when it must be discouraging and demoralizing. 

 

And here’s the thing you can do. If you care about whether giraffes will exist outside of zoos - or lions or elephants - if that is important, if there’s some inherent value in a world where these amazing, complex beings can live the lives they’ve evolved to live, then go to Africa. It’s easier than you think. I mean, you can make it hard if you want, but there’s a whole industry and armies of people prepared to help make it easy for you to go. Experience this world. It will forever change your outlook. Take your children. Show them something worth fighting for. I’m afraid that this is the only way to keep some corner of our planet available, especially for these charismatic and large species like lions and elephants and rhino and giraffe.

 

Let me share these examples. Trophy hunters will spend 10 to 20 times more to visit a private reserve and shoot a lion than a traveler will spend to photograph that lion. If the assumption is that these beings have no inherent value beyond what the marketplace dictates, and if you are an owner of a private reserve, trying to make a living, what are you going to do when the travelers with cameras quit coming? And if you are managing a national park the size of Israel and your budget is slashed because international tourism is paralyzed due to a pandemic, how can you keep up the incredibly costly anti-poaching infrastructure when rhino horn is more valuable than gold in the marketplace? How do we resist the corruption, fueled and cultivated by international organized crime and truly evil nation states, without demonstrating the economic value of keeping these animals on our planet?

 

I have to believe that COVID is a brief interlude and that the travel industry will pick up again as we learn to live with it. I must believe that the inherent drivers that lead people to spend money for the ‘vacation of a lifetime’ are still intact and that when people feel that it’s safe to travel again, they will come back. So, if you ever had the bug to go, don’t tell yourself a story about how hard or scary it is. Just go. Go to Umlani, where the nicest people in the world are waiting to help you experience this world. Go to any one of a large number of reserves and you will be amazed. And, as you return home, you will begin thinking about the next trip. I can promise that.

 

I will begin editing images and will post them periodically on the blog and on Instagram. And I still want to tell people about how amazing it all is when you look beneath the surface. I want people to know how amazing hyenas are and I want them to know about the inner lives of impala and elephants.

 

More to come.