Taking the zig zag path ...

This site is dedicated to my long-suffering writing group. For the past year now, I've been telling them that I've got this safari essay I'm trying to write.

Great! they'd say. Bring it along.

And so I'd show up, late, still needing coffee, somehow also with coffee stains on the damp paper copies of this partly-written essay, and I'd say something like, "this is just a draft, this is just a piece of it, I'm still putting things together."

And so, because they're really nice people, much nicer than I deserve, they'd read this fragment of an essay that I'd dragged in and say, "that's a great description of the flight in, Hannah, but when are we getting to the safari?" And I'd say, thanks, and go away to write about the safari, and then come back with another part that's about the time I went on a holiday as a kid with my parents, except it was a biking holiday because I was supposed to lose weight, but I probably gained weight instead because it was in France and I had never had pâté before, so I definitely showed my parents who was boss.

This has now happened, what, five or six times. These poor, patient writers probably think I've never been on a safari in my life. I have yet to describe an animal in any of my writing. The best they've gotten is a few little lines about some ants. And -- oh, yes, the locusts. Keep your eye out for those -- I didn't because I'm sometimes an idiot, but hopefully, you'll be less of an idiot than me.

That's the other thing about this blog. Along with giving me a place to write it all out, put all the pieces of this blasted story in one sprawling online landscape, I learned a lot as I went, and I have a lot more to learn. I hope to share some of what I learned, and if you have something to share, feel free to write.

Anyway, here's the bit about the ants:

We arrived at Sarara in afternoon; the equatorial sun had passed its apex; every drop of freshness had been wrung from the air. The manager demonstrated how to use the outdoor shower, and as she did so, she pointed to a short line of ants on the stairs and mentioned, with some hesitation in her voice, that due to the recent heavy rains, the area had seen a rise in the number of insects. In particular, they had had quite a few locusts in the camp.

The ants did not seem unusual to me — we were out of doors after all, and the ants themselves seemed entirely occupied with the endless menial tasks with which ants do occupy themselves. There were no visible locusts. I had no idea, then, how locusts would come to dominate my evenings, how their surprising heft would come to be immediately recognizable as unlike any other insect that might surprise one between the shoulder blades or by dropping into one’s wind-whipped and already very tangled hair. Locusts, it turns out, can have real heft: fattened by good rains, when jumping at speed they can run into you with the soft thud of a cocktail sausage thrown by a man with a good arm. But I knew none of this. It was easy to say that we would be just fine.