An Inordinate Fondness for Animals

Can I just start by saying that, should you ever doubt it, we continue to live in an age of wonders. If you need proof, a new species of *whale* has just been discovered. And not, a new species of whale in Antarctica or some far-off place.

No.

There is a new species of whale – the Rice’s whale -- discovered in the *Gulf of Mexico*.

Right by Louisiana, Mississipi, Alabama, and Florida – THAT Gulf of Mexico. Like, just a quick paddle from where I grew up. A whole new whale. Unbelievable.

I feel like I should get out my monocle. I feel like I should contact Linnaeus. I can’t believe this still happens. Anyway, Happy Early President’s Day, everyone.

(Not the new whale. Image by Dennis Larsen from Pixabay.)

***

I’d like to start writing a little more about my trips to Africa and going on safari. To do that, I think I should say a few words first about the kind of nature-lover I am, and what got me interested in safaris in the first place.

I was the kind of kid who was obsessed with the drawers of beetles at Natural History museums. Those colorful exoskeletons staggered me in their infinitesimal, prismatic variation; the pins staggered me in their cool, methodical piecing, right in the center of each shimmering body.

(As an aside, I love this quotation from David Quammen’s book, Natural Acts in reference to the fact that there are an amazing variety of beetles in this world, about 300,000 species discovered so far: “One of them asked what inferences a person could draw from a study of the created world as to the nature of the Creator. Haldane answered: ‘An inordinate fondness for beetles.’”)

I also loved — I mean, I absolutely wore out the copy of the tape at the local VCR rental place — a nature documentary, “Animals are Beautiful People.” The premise of this movie was that it was a normal documentary of the Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa, but with a humorous voice-over, giving the thoughts of the animals involved. Two warthogs “negotiating” how to scooch butt-first into the tight tunnel of their warthog abode, that kind of thing.

There’s an infamous scene with a drunk elephant and drunk monkeys and drunk warthogs and drunk everything else that gives the impression that every year, the animals of the veldt wait for the fruit of the amarula tree to ferment and then go all in together on a real boozer.

There is actually a tree called an amarula tree and its fruit can be turned into a very tasty alcohol that your safari guides will be pleased to put into your coffee in the mornings if you like, but it probably won’t surprise you to learn that there isn’t some kind of mutual agreement among the animals to all go get drunk together one night a year.

(Sadly, the amount of booze they had to give the elephant in order to get her drunk was apparently really pretty horrendous. Scientists who have disproven the “elephants eat rotten amarula fruits to get drunk” theory estimate that “an elephant would have to ingest more than 1,400 well-fermented fruits to start to get drunk.”)

At any rate, what this all added up to was an increasing obsession with going on safari as a kid. So, my parents did what parents everywhere have done with obsessed children: they gave me an unwise promise. I must have been about seven at the time, so they picked an age that seemed impossibly far in the future — I think it was 15 — and said that when I was fifteen, they would take me on safari.

Problem solved. I would have to remember the promise for double my lifetime again, and then some.

Except, of course, like all children who have been made unwise promises, I did remember. I didn’t talk about it much, but I remembered, and as my fifteenth birthday approached and we didn’t seem to be breaking out the travel brochures, I started bringing it up. “Won’t it be exciting when we’re in Kenya for my birthday,” I might have said. Or, fake-modestly, “you don’t have to get me anything else except that safari to South Africa.”

I have no idea how my parents might have solved this dilemma except that it solved itself. A few years before I turned 15, my Dad had developed an internal bleeding problem that prevented him from traveling outside the easy reach of a good hospital. A trip to the bush, it was decided, was just too risky; a safari would be impossible.

“Of course, that’s fine,” I said. “Your health is the most important thing.”

I meant it, but it always rankled, just a little bit. I had been so sure that I would get meet the warthogs and the elephants and the beetles alive and scurrying. Instead they remained resolutely alive but on the other side of the world, or dead and neatly pinned with me on my side.

All this was why, when I got the chance to go to a conference in South Africa and add on a safari, I absolutely leapt at the chance.

And it’s also why, when my Dad began to get seriously ill in the same spring that I was planning the safari, the spring of 2015, it felt strangely resonant, as if even the mention of a safari could bring bad health.

As my Dad lost strength, the safari grew in my mind, shoving out the hospital hallways, the endless beeping and clanging, the hushed conversations. The safari, the safari, the safari. There was always the safari.

And then, after a few short months, my Dad died. I would never go on safari with him, or even tell him about going on safari. I would go without him, but with my husband, Michael, and later my Mom, and later still, my brother, and nephew, and cousins from Michael’s family too.

I would bring heartache and love and joy and sadness, and I would find all those and more waiting for me. That’s what safari came to mean to me: more than a vacation, it became a way of experiencing the world differently with new people and new animals for a short space of time.

I hope I’m able to share some of these experiences with y’all — particularly of course all the joy and love that I found there!

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all!